


This Man This Dutiful Man

by noun



Category: Dishonored (Video Games)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Boot Worship, Dishonored Kink Meme, F/M, Femdom, Low Chaos Emily Kaldwin, Loyalty, Orgasm Delay/Denial, Redemption, but not really
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-23
Updated: 2018-03-14
Packaged: 2018-09-01 14:36:43
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 8
Words: 41,640
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8628295
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/noun/pseuds/noun
Summary: In 1847 in Dunwall, Emily thinks very little of taking an ex-Academy student to bed during the Fugue Feast.
Five years later, in the midst of her aunt's coup, she meets Kirin Jindosh again. 
He has not forgotten.





	1. Dunwall, 1847

**Author's Note:**

> Set five years before the start of Dishonored 2, two years before Delilah is summoned, and one year after Emily and Wyman get together for the first time.

"This man, this dutiful man, has got this sense of devotion.  
One look, one touch of her hand can set the spiral in motion."

'Move' - Saint Motel

 

“What is this place,” she asks, but she already knows, and feels, for the first time, a sharp pang of disappointment in Wyman. She spent long enough in The Golden Cat to still get nauseous when the smell of incense and spilled alcohol mix just right, but the stink of sex makes it clear. She wishes the mask covering her face was cloth that might filter some of the smell away and not the metal she has instead, but for this Fugue Feast she has only what Corvo gave her the day before.

“It's a-” Wyman’s tongue slips out, moistening lips before speaking. She didn’t need Corvo’s training to know nervousness when she sees it, taking pity and adjusting the collar of Wyman’s coat, smoothing down the lapels. They’re both dressed richly enough to be identified as nobles—this is a party with an entrance fee, but Wyman’s hair is up while hers is down, to prevent them from being identified as anything _but_ generic young bluebloods. While the Feast doesn’t technically exist, the last thing she wants is to be recognized. Nobles have been ruined for mistakes made during the Feast, and as secure as she is, a misstep could ruin _everything_.

“I know,” she says, smiling for Wyman. Some of the fear leaves Wyman’s eyes after that, and Emily’s hand is taken and given a gentle squeeze. Wyman, just like everyone else in her empire, needs a little comforting now and again. Together, with Wyman lifting the gauzy tapestry out of the way, they step into the party, her eyes taking a moment to adjust to the low light.

Now that she’s free to give it some thought, Emily realizes the incense the host is burning is a different blend than the Cat, and while she can smell alcohol, it’s not the yeasty smell of cheap beer, but the sweetness of wine and expensive liquors. The lights are electric, turned low, the shades covered with blue paper, casting the room into shades that stir her memory, make her pause and consider before Wyman tugs her hand impatiently and begins to lead her over to the bar.

They’ve made it easy to distinguish between the help and the patrons. The bartender has a full-face mask, same as the guards they passed on the way in. Emily wonders what they’re being paid to ignore the chance to have their own Feast, but then she remembers the sewer workers on retainer and those at the electric stations and revises her previous thoughts. There’s a whole hidden section of the Imperial budget set aside for just this sort of thing.

Wyman catches the bartender’s attention by rapping on the wood surface and the woman wanders over, her expression hidden behind porcelain.

“Rum,” Wyman says at the same time that Emily says “Pear soda,” but the bartender only nods and turns to fetch the liquor first. Wyman raises a brow, but Emily only shrugs in a very un-Empress like way. The bartender sets down the glass for Wyman and opens the soda in front of Emily, pouring it over ice and handing it to her. Emily murmurs her thanks and both of them turn to look over the party. It’s respectable enough, for a Feast party, with most of the patrons in some state of undress. Not five feet from the bar, a woman sits in the lap of another while a third reaches into the front of her trousers and bites at her neck. The low murmur of conversation is louder than the noises, but a hallway stretches down the left, and the private rooms are usually where the worst of it is.

“Stairs on the right go down to the hound fights,” the bartender offers, and Wyman perks up, leaning over to kiss her cheek and grasp her hand.

“You don’t mind if I go?” Wyman asks, and Emily shakes her head.

“No,” she murmurs. “I’ll see you at dawn.”

That’s when the High Overseer will ring his bell and proclaim the end of the Feast, and with it, the start of the new year. If Wyman wants to spend the time between now and then indulging in a once-yearly vice, those are Wyman’s Feast plans. Emily—

Emily isn’t sure. Corvo had reluctantly offered what Jessamine had done when the Fugue Feast rolled around. She did the math once, curious, and was terribly glad when she realized that Feast babies were always born in the Month of Hearths or Ice, while she was safely placed in the Month of Rain. She takes her soda and looks once more at Wyman’s retreating back before she sits herself in one of the high-backed chairs near the bar.

It’s comfortable, and her soda is cool against her palm. She can pick out snippets of conversation from those around her, but she extends the same courtesy expected of them: she doesn’t listen over much, just lets the conversation wash over her.

Emily resigns herself to spending the night like that, waiting for Wyman (Wyman waits for her often enough, it’s a fair trade) but someone settles down into one of the chairs next to her. Her mask turns what she can see into a narrow tunnel, and so she must turn her head to look at him.

Where her mask is all even lines and delicate curls, this man’s is sharp, angular. The only ornamentation is where the acid has eaten away at the copper, creating inimitable patterns of bright metal and green-grey patina. He is dressed sharply, a waistcoat with a generous measure of fabric at the wrists, the cuffs tight with shining links. His collar is high, his throat covered with a black neckerchief with gilt edges. There’s no dirt under his nails, but his fingers are calloused and he wears no rings. The mask doesn’t hide the thin mustache. The whole picture comes together well enough, presents him as confident, comfortable in his expensive clothes. He looks at her like he’s entitled to the view, but it’s not particularly lecherous. Just—searching. Curious. He's evaluating her, or something about her.

“You sit your chair like a throne,” he says, and it takes a good deal of effort on Emily’s part not to adjust her posture. Inconspicuous, she reminds herself. Confident. It’s the Feast; she can be anything she wants from the first time the bell tolls until the second. Who is this man, to call her out on how she sits in a chair?

She realizes that she’s taken too long to respond to him. His brows rise behind the mask, he slouches back in the chair, smirking. “Surely this is not your first Feast? It’s so boring here. In Karnaca, this would have dissolved into an orgy by now. You proper Dunwallers—I suppose it comes from having a prissy little Empress with a cunt as dry as Dust. It ends with everyone too wrapped around the Abbey’s fingers to even fuck on the Feast— “

“Shut up,” she says, calm as anything. She’s dealt with worse and had to be regal to them, but she’s anonymous here and now, and she can finally say what she’s wished to—delivered in the exact tone she usually reserves for her throne. It's a crass, unthinking rudeness, and she knows just how to shut it down. Oddly enough, the man from—Karnaca, he said? where Corvo was born—stops talking, neatly as that. Anger twists his mouth, and he’s about to open it again when she turns the full force of what Corvo calls the ‘Empress look’ on him, the one she saves for when she’s angry and allowed by protocol to be angry. It’s a commander dressing down troops, a mother scolding a naughty child—not upset, just disappointed. Cold anger rather than hot.

It—has an odd effect on the man. His mouth hangs open, in the middle of preparing to speak and she reaches over to close it for him, two fingers under his chin forcing it closed, his teeth hitting one another with a sharp click. It’s very good he got his tongue out of the way first, because she wouldn’t have given a rat’s arse if he bit it. “You’re an insipid fool, running your mouth on the one night anyone can make you accountable for your words.”

He swallows, which she can tell by the heavy bob of his throat, but his lips stay closed as he watches her. He looks afraid, but also—

Emily looks down at his lap, and pressing against the linen of his trousers is a noticeable erection. She goes from two fingers under his chin to her hand gripping his jaw, half rising out of her chair to tower over him by a few precious inches. He watches her, wide-eyed, his breath coming faster. She feels the heat of it on her wrist as his gaze darts—from her lips, to her eyes, to something over her shoulder.

“Is this what you want?” she murmurs, and now she does slip into anger. Her nails dig into the soft, shaven skin of his cheeks. “You disgusting little man, is this how you spend your Feast, insulting everything and anything until someone gets bored of your twittering and puts you in your place. You _want_ someone to hold you accountable.”

He looks at her with wide brown eyes. She feels his jaw flexing, and relaxes her grip by degrees enough to let him speak. “Yes,” he hisses out, all earlier defiance melting. How quickly he slips from bristling to obedient. “Please—”

She lets go of him, and it appears he’s been putting more of his weight into leaning on her, too tightly-wound and stiff to do anything but collapse when she lets him go, falling back into his chair while she relaxes back into hers, neatly crossing her legs and squeezing her thighs discretely to ward off the sudden flush of her own unexpected pleasure.

The man, meanwhile, is rubbing his jaw, working blood back into the half-moon marks her sharp nails have left. Like a beaten dog, he risks a glance back in her direction. She responds only by staring back at him, sipping her drink, bubbles sparking against her tongue. He hesitates ( _now_ , he hesitates) before slowly sinking to the floor until he’s kneeling at her feet. The glance he shoots her is hateful, but his hands betray him, shaking as he takes her boot in his hand and bends to kiss the leather, one hand at her ankle and the other cradling the curve between her toes and the height of the boots’ heel.

Emily rests her elbow on the arm of the chair, her chin in her palm and looking down at him. The man can’t help but look up at her again, lips hovering just above her boot.

“Go on,” she says. “Apologize.”

He slides forward on the sticky floor, until the toe of her boot rests against the lump of his erection in his pants. As he licks a messy stripe up the leather, she presses down, a reedy whine breaking from his throat, his fingers pressing into her leg as the solid steel toes of her boot really start to apply pressure.

Emily stops once he starts to beg in a low voice, still raining kisses down on her boot. “Please,” he says again, like before. “Please, please—”

She’s starting to like the sound of it. She eases her foot off, and his voice lowers, drops back down to a normal pitch, rubbing his cheek against her thigh as he rises up on his knees slowly, kissing along the line of her thigh while his hands slide up, one on her ankle and one on her calf. The corners of his mask have been beveled smooth and do not catch on her clothes. His kisses are becoming bolder, and he’s about to unfold her legs for her, about to slip his shoulder between her knees and make his affections more obvious. Emily’s sure he has to be able to smell her, she can feel how wet she is, sure unclenching her thighs will—

Will what? He wants to please her. _He_ has to want that, because it’s what _she_ wants, and he’s made it very clear with his pitiful little noises that he wants to be wanted, wants to be used. He got a cockstand from her giving him a dressing down, and Emily wants to indulge this Feast. Her Rules with Wyman allow for this and the bonecharm against her breast, given to her by Corvo on her majority, covers everything else.

His hands are both on her thigh now, about to unhook right from left, and so she twists her hand into the slicked-back mass of his hair, firmly yanking him away. His hands still, and he goes ragdoll soft in her grip. She likes the way he looks at her before he remembers himself and tries to muster some defiance. It dies again, of course, but it makes her wonder who he is during the real year. His mouth has fallen open again. Someone self-assured, she assumes. She has the whole Empire behind her, and her father’s talents too. She could find out who this man from Serkonos is, but—

Some things ought to remain in shadow, in this forbidden space between years that does exist and also does not. She’ll let this man live there. In all likelihood, they’ll never meet again.

She unfolds her legs—ignores the pointed stare at her crotch—and stands, hauling him alongside. He’s still kitten limp, and so she pulls him by his hair until he gets his feet under him. He has to have wanted that, to offer no resistance or help when she rose. He’s a glutton for pain, for punishment, wants not to be wanted. He watches her, and she watches the hope in his eyes as they dart to the right, where the rows of private rooms lie.

Emily inclines her head by degrees, squeezing the handful of hair she has tighter, turning his head in that direction before releasing him. She settles her hand at the small of his back, a small constant pressure to guide him as they walk, she just a step behind. The earlier tension in his shoulders has been released, he seems serene. Purposeful. They’re passing by the bar as they go when a woman looks over both of them, sets down her glass, and sides in their path, blocking them. She’s been drinking heavily, and the outfit she wears shows far too much, with excess flesh spilling over, seams too tightly clinging to her body. The pretty trance the man had settled into is broken the instant he sees the woman looking at them, and Emily is very displeased to see that smirk returning to his lips, as well as a new rigid set to his shoulders.

“Well,” the woman drawls, placing a hand on her hip in a way that might have been alluring if the whole of her wasn’t so disheveled and she was a decade or two younger and soberer. “Has someone been naughty?”

She says it in the same baby voice Emily is sure she uses for whatever small animals she has at home, some inbred gaggle of dogs, if Emily has to guess. There are a hundred just like her at court, and their sons and daughters are even worse. The woman reaches for the man—as if to pinch his cheek, and he slaps her hand away. She withdraws it sharply, brings it to her breast, and all that fake sweetness melting away into an instant.

“Do you know who I am—” the woman asks, money and breeding pitching her voice an octave higher, and Emily intercedes before the man can start a fight.

“No,” she says, coolly. “And you don’t want me to,” and waits for the woman to realize what she’s just threatened to do during a Fugue Feast. The realization comes quickly to her, and her lips purse before she pales, slack-jawed, and retreats back to the bar. Her eyes follow Emily and her—guest back as she directs him forward with a hand again on his back, but the mood’s been ruined. All the obedience so carefully nurtured during those few minutes when the man had come to her willingly, wanting to be submissive, wanting a firm hand, and those minutes in the chair where they had felt one another out—all wasted. But he still walks with her, still waits mutely as she requests a key from the masked attendant and follows her to the room that’s so graciously unlocked for them. Clean sheets between guests—well, she can’t fault Wyman for choosing anything less than the best.

The door closes behind them after the attendant hands Emily the key. She sets it on a table next to a pitcher of water—there’s that, a bed, a smaller table next to it, a window, and a fireplace for the cold months. On the bed, there’s an assortment of objects, and Emily wanders over to it to see what’s been left out for them. Oil, of course, and some of the skin sheathes that prevent pregnancy. There’s a phallus carved from some sort of bone—not whalebone, she hopes. Rope, which she runs her fingers along.

From behind her, the man speaks.

“This world is filled with idiots.” He’s fishing something out of his pockets. Emily turns around to see him fixing a pipe, filling the room with the smell of expensive tobacco. He toys with the silver container as he holds the stem of the pipe between his teeth.

Emily perches on the edge of the bed, palms flat on the comforter.

“Come over here,” she says, testing his willingness to obey after all that. Perhaps he just wants to gather his pride back about him before he goes back out, or perhaps this can be salvaged. Perhaps surprising both of them, he does just that, coming to a stop before where she stands, pipe still between his teeth.

She reaches up to take the case from him, and opens in. There are initials on the outside, KJ, in a flowery script, but she ignores them, instead examining the small wax-wrapped pouch of tobacco and the selection of matches alongside a tamper. The heads are red rather than white, and she looks at him expectantly, fingers resting on the matchsticks.

“Red phosphorus. They must be struck on the design on the back to light. Safety matches for the masses. Idiot-proof,” he drawls, speaking around the pipe.

“Not white?” She asks, and he shakes his head, deigns to take the pipe out of his mouth.

“No. It causes illness in workers. These do not cause the rot, and can be made for a fraction of the cost.”

“Phosphorus jaw,” she adds, taking one of the matches out of his case and turning it over to find the textured bit he spoke of, running her finger over it. Emily looks up to find him staring at her differently, as if he’s not found her wanting after all. She puts an end to it—she doesn’t like people looking down at her. She knows her worth. Instead, she lights one of the long matches and waits for him. He returns the pipe to his mouth and leans in. Emily lights the tobacco for the first time, and clouds of smoke waft around her face as he puffs on the pipe, still looking into her eyes.

“Do you want me to choke,” she manages, when she feels as though her eyes are about to water. Still, her voice is even. She shakes the match out and drops it into the helpful ashtray on the bedside table.

“No,” the man says, and leans away. He takes the pipe out of his mouth, waits for the smoke to clear, but she motions for it, taking it from his hand and taking the tamper out of the case to press the tobacco down before handing it back to him. She lights another match and then the bowl again, once more shaking it out and then throwing it into the ashtray.

If this were a day of the year with a relationship she intended to pursue—if it was real—maybe she’d offer a story about how she did this for Samuel. Who Samuel was. But it’s not, and the old sailor is far too precious a memory to be brought up in this place. So she offers no explanation for this man she’ll never see again.

Again, the pipe billows smoke, but it’s more opaque this time. It makes his olive skin look like a silvergraph rendering, washing him out. Emily reaches out and takes the pipe from his mouth and hooks a finger in his neckerchief, tugging him down for a kiss. She’s demanding, forcing her tongue into his mouth and pulling a little too hard on the fabric looped around his neck while she kisses him. He responds eagerly, setting his hands palm down on either side of her and leaning into her space.

He’s been invited. She’ll allow it.

Emily nips at his lower lip, exploring the taste of his mouth with her tongue, pleased when he imitates what she does. She thinks it less a marker of inexperience than a desire to know what she likes. She likes the heat of his breath on her skin, how he tilts his head so their masks don’t touch. His teeth are crooked and imperfect, and she tastes mint and rum and smoke in his mouth.

She’s the one to break the kiss, but he takes the initiative in pulling away once she’s indicated she’s finished. Emily offers his pipe back to him. He bends to take it with his mouth rather than his hands, and she nods once in approval. Slowly, the man sinks to the floor again and once more Emily crosses her legs. He bends to do as he did before, smoke rising lazily from the pipe, but she rests her hand on the top of his head, petting rather than pulling.

“No.” He tilts his head up, and she graces him with a smile. “Undress me,” she says instead, lifting her foot so he understands the idea.

He undoes the buckle with clever fingers, which she takes a chance to admire, especially as he runs his fingers down the thin leather from calf to instep before settling his hands at her foot and easing the boot off her right foot. He leans back, and she recrosses her legs so he can do the same with the other side. The rings of smoke from his pipe are the easiest indication of his breathing, and now they rise lazy and slow, steadying as he settles into routine.

He rolls down her stockings slowly, as if he’s savoring it, holding her leg as he did in the open area of the establishment. He sets her boots to the side, both of them perfectly straight, and her stockings draped over them. She stands so he can remove her trousers, but he lingers, kneeling at her feet, smoothing his hand over her calf. With slow hands, he removes his half-finished pipe from his mouth. The bedside table is too far from the bed for him to have it within reach, but he stays on his knees as he moves over to it, crawling for the distance and setting the pipe down in the ashtray, discarded like the stiff way he had held himself. He comes back to her, and presses his cheek to her thigh. His eyes are closed, and she returns her hand to his hair, stroking, tidying the strands that had been knocked out of place while she had dragged him across the bar. He makes a noise that dies in the back of his throat, and nuzzles closer, pressing his nose to her crotch and wrapping his arm around her legs.

He holds himself there, breathing in the smell of her, and Emily permits this for a few minutes. The process of soothing him and bringing him back was not as convoluted as she imagined, but she supposes he has his own methods of centering himself and relinquishing himself to fantasy.

Her hand laces in his hair, and she doesn’t even need to pull for him to realize and shuffle backwards, eyes downcast.

“Very good,” she murmurs. With one hand in her hair, she undoes her belt and drops it on the floor, the buckle hitting the floor with a loud clank. He leans forward, lips parting as she undoes the button of her pants and peels the fly apart. Her panties are satin, stained dark with her arousal, the black even blacker with moisture, and it is predictably that he focuses on, needing no prompting to press his lips to the mound of her cunt, tongue dragging against the fabric. He’s in his own world, eyes closed, his hands gripping her thighs hard.

But when she says, “Enough.” he stops and drops his head, looking at the floor while his shoulders shake. He’s breathing so hard, but she ignores him for the moment to drop her pants down to her ankles and then step out of them, folding them with brisk precision and setting them on the floor next to her boots. Then comes her jacket, bonecharm stitched into the seams, and her blouse, and the brassiere, a similar utilitarian black to match her underclothes.

He’s still lost to himself when she sits back on the bed, and she tilts his head up and into looking at her with the tips of her toes under his chin. Men like this need praise in equal measure with the chastising.

“You’ve done well so far,” she notes, head tilting to the side as she judges him and the erection that’s helpfully returned.

“Thank you,” he murmurs, keeping his eyes on the ground while she speaks. Emily rests both of her feet back on the floor and hooks her thumbs in her panties, leaning forward and lifting her hips so they end up around her knees. The man shifts forward, catches himself, stops, and looks to her for permission. Emily nods, still bend in half, and he takes the edge between his teeth and pulls it all down the final few inches until they fall on the floor. Emily sets her elbows on her knees and her chin in the cradle both her palms make while he sits on his heels. She shifts her head to the right and reaches out with the left, swiping her thumb over his lower lip. Without instruction, he parts it, and she runs the pad along the uneven line of his teeth. There’s three silver fillings in the back teeth—that would have given him away as being from Karnaca, and when her thumb brushes the first, fillings glinting, his mouth closes, puckering around her finger as he sucks, running the tip of his tongue along her fingerprint. The natural philosophers say there’s no two alike, and if they had some way to chart that, maybe he imagines finding her again with it. Or maybe he just likes having things in his mouth—likely the second.

Her thighs, which have been clenched so tightly together, slide against one another as she shifts, the skin slick and wet. She feels drenched, as if she could be leaving a stain on the coverlet below, but knows it’s her imagination. There’s no real fight when she slides her thumb free from his mouth. He leans forward as she does so, as if tied by a string, and Emily falls back on the bed, pushing the toys to the side with a shove. Finally, her thighs part, and he surges forward. Emily rests her legs on him, knees on his shoulders and locking his neck between her thighs as her heels bump against his back. She lifts her head off the bed just enough to notice him looking at her before he dips his head and parts the lips of her cunt with his tongue. Whimpering at the taste—or perhaps just the feeling of her thighs squeezing around his neck, he brushes her clit with that touch and it’s a reaction she’s never managed to leash—he lays to the task with greater enthusiasm than she might have expected when he spat at her back in the bar. But it’s always this sort of person who turns out to lust the most, isn’t it? The ones who build themselves around not wanting, and then find themselves overwhelmed during the Feast, spending a years’ worth of shame all at once.

Emily offers assistance, seeing how his hands are currently trapped at his sides by the collar she’s made of her long, long legs. She lets one hand twist into the coverlet, and spreads herself open with two fingers of the other hand. “Like this,” she instructs, voice soft as she uses one finger to pull the hood back from her clit and the other to rub circles against the flushed bud. He likes watching, his breath growing ragged, and she feels her hand being pressed out of the way by his mouth and lips settling down to take over the work. Again, she’s forced to twist her hand into his hair, needing to rise from the bed to properly pull him away.

The back of her hand collides with his cheek. He didn’t flinch—he wasn’t expecting the strike, but it hasn’t angered him. When his head turns back from from the impact, the looks he gives her borders adoring, and he licks his lips—he’ll have a bruise, maybe, and she avoided hitting the mask, but she has no rings on her fingers and so his lip hasn’t split—and speaks.

“I did not ask,” he states, confident.

“Yes,” Emily agrees, settling back down against the bed. Her arms stretch back up—he’s lost his chance for help or further instruction, but he seems more confident now, more assured of his boundaries. His eyelashes are surprisingly long, twisting what she thinks is a thin face into feminine. She can’t be sure—his eyes peek out from the mask, but she would wager they’re long enough to cast shadows on his cheeks.

“May I?”

“'May you' what?” she stresses, stretching languidly.

“May I lick your cunt?” he asks, and it finally all comes together, her heel pressing into his back at the same time that she murmurs permission. He takes to it quickly, enthusiastically, inexperience melting away once he learns to read the cues she offers. As before, she tried to clamp her thighs closed when he does anything that makes her seize with pleasure. But there’s other signs as well, the flutter in the muscles of her stomach when he presses as much of his tongue into her as he can manage while the coldness of his mask presses against her thighs. If both her hands weren’t twisted into the covers she might have them in his hair, pressing his face even closer to her, as if by shoving his mouth closer it’ll make him work harder. It doesn’t, but he does start to make the most gratifying of noises, these little whimpers as he struggles to obey his mistress and his thirst. As she chases her own end, she settles for grinding against his mouth, using him to get the friction she needs to tip her over the edge and into the release she so craves—

Emily’s toes curl, and then her legs go slack. She slumps boneless against the bed, breathing heavily but silently. Staying quiet at all times was a skill drilled into her by Corvo, and even here she’s stuck with it, her ribs heaving as she gathers herself enough to rise on her elbow and peer over the edge of the bed.

And there he is, still looking at the floor, wetness smeared around his mouth and chin, shine on even the tip of his nose. His breathing is measured, his hands palm down on his thighs, and Emily isn’t sure she could move him if she tried.

So she doesn’t. She slides over on the bed and sets her feet down on the cool wood floor, stepping quickly until she’s on the rug. Emily can feel the chill that sweeps through her, tightens her nipples and raises gooseflesh on her skin. The rug makes it better.

She aches; still feels unfulfilled, but she’s kind enough to step back towards the door and the water, pouring herself a glass and taking a long swallow, wiping her mouth on the back of her arm before refilling the glass and going back to the bed. He’s still frozen there, kneeling, but he responds to touch, and she sets the glass to his lips and tilts it when he opens them, swallowing faster than she had, his hands coming up to settle down over hers, trying to drink faster.

“Slowly,” Emily corrects, and decreases the angle of the glass. His hands tighten, he fights her for a second before giving in. She lets him finish all of it before she places the glass on the side table and waits. He doesn’t seem to be willing to go. The stillness isn’t fear, Emily thinks, but submission. Peace. He rises when she hooks a finger in his collar and gives just the smallest bit of a tug. He lets her run her hands down over his chest, presses into them. When she leans to kiss him again, he tilts his head rather than make her account for her mask, and it’s sweeter now, his mouth pliant and tasting like her, bitter and tangy.

“Isn’t this so much easier?” she asks him, breaking the kiss, and a hoarse, “—yes.” Comes from him in response.

She smiles, and turns him around, pushing him onto the bed and straddling him. His hands settle at her hips, brushing back and forth over her hipbones and the hard muscles of her stomach. She arches her back, hands over her head as she stretches once more, lets him admire her and all the hard work she’s put into her body. It’s easy to slide out of the stretch and into rolling her hips lazily against the erection in his trousers, and Emily falls forward until her breasts are pressed against his chest. One hand undoes the knot of his neckerchief as she nips at his neck, tugging the collar down once his neckerchief is undone. His hands, still at her waist, flinch each time teeth close on flesh, but he cants his hips upward to better give her something to rut against. She wraps the silk strip around her fist and enjoys the feel of his pants rasping against her sensitive cunt. Eventually she moves one of his hands from her hips to her breast, instructing him with his hand over hers on how to touch her as she likes. He has such damnably clever fingers that quickly warm to the task, and they could both come like this, couldn’t they? There would be such a thrill in making him ruin his trousers, need to deal with the sticky mess, and there would be fun, too, in reprimanding him for taking away the chance to ride him.

He’s making those little noises again. Emily has to make a choice—dawn isn’t far enough off for her to have both—and she chooses to rise back up onto her knees. He whimpers at the loss, but he learned from before and doesn’t bother reaching for her or taking the initiative. There are red marks blooming on his throat, and she soothes him with a sympathetic noise before reaching for the closures of his trousers. Her hand slides into his smalls, sliding back at the same time that she uses her hands to get his pants and underclothes low enough that his prick falls forward onto his belly, smearing precome against his navel.

“Oh,” she murmurs, and reaches out to touch the head of his cock, curious despite herself at the odd shape. Where there’s normally a scar right under the head, he hasn’t been cut by the Abbey. The procedure hasn’t taken root in Serkonos like it has in Gristol. Emily hasn’t had the chance to, well, see a cock that looks like this, and it isn’t as if the opportunity will come every Feast, let alone any day. Emily toys with his foreskin, sliding it off the head and absently stroking up with her fist to see if she can return it to covering more of the head.

It’s only when he whimpers that she realizes what she’s playing with is attached to a very real man, one wound very tightly, his balls drawn up close. It isn’t as if he’s been enjoying the impersonalizing touch, the clinical way she’s been observing him, but she has much more to do.

She unwraps the scarf from around her fist and turns it into a figure eight knot like Samuel taught her (though for admittedly different uses) with one loop around his prick and another around his balls, pulling it tight. Then she lines herself up, fingers round the base of his cock so the side as she comes down on him is smooth. The man’s head falls back, grunting with effort and a mix of discomfort from the knot and the relief of finally being sheathed in a wet, hot body. The hand he left on her breast tightens as she starts to roll her hips to ride him, depending upon the muscles in her thighs as she rises and sinks down on him, one hand on her clit to help herself and another on the bed to hold herself steady. 

He behaves even as sweat breaks out on his brow, refusing to buck up into her warmth, fingers digging into her hip while he lets her take him. He won’t fight back—this is the way he prefers it to be, and because he knows she’ll put him in his place if he tries. They both like this too much to jeopardize it—he, the feel of her cunt, how it squeezes him, how small he finally feels under the woman above him, the feel of her breast in his hand and cockiness stripped from him.

Emily’s rhythm finally starts to stutter, more concerned with getting the head of his prick to hit the right place on the down stroke, and faster, fingers rubbing her clit but mostly curling as she rides the shocks of pleasure.

She finishes first, gasping, no name to say and no inclination to even if she knew it, and he bucks up, trying, yearning, but the tie wrapped around both cock and balls makes it difficult, and once more he starts to get frantic, pleading with her.

“I need to—please, please let me, haven’t I been good—“ and that’s all he gets out while she pulls herself back form a blissful afterglow to loosen the scarf now soaked with both of their fluids dripping down the length of him. He’s quick to roll them over, draw her knee up, and rut into her with abandon while she tips her head back and moans, finally letting noise slip from her. He’s a man determinedly chasing an end, thrusting without a pace. But he still searches for her approval, looking down into her eyes. The hand she’s left on the back of his neck pulls him down to kiss her. Teeth click against one another, and he’s sloppier than before but they both are, until he makes an odd noise in the back of his mouth and seizes, driving into once, twice, three times, the heat of his seed splitting inside her while he presses his face into the curve of her neck, the edges of his mask biting harshly into her skin.

Emily doesn’t mind. She strokes his hair, pulls the scarf off his prick. It’s ruined now, but both of them had a hand in that. He’s courteous enough not to lay all of his weight on her, his hand still on her hip. They lay like that for some time, until the seed drying on her thighs starts to get tacky and itch.

Slowly, Emily rises, and he watches her as she wipes herself down with the water remaining in the glass. She dresses precisely, tugging her clothes into place and rearranging herself as if she didn’t have a spectacular round of sex. The man, meanwhile, has far less to do when he eventually rises—pull his pants up and find some way to hide the marks on his neck. Whatever wrinkles are in his pressed trousers will stay until he can have them ironed. 

It’s force of habit that has her about to twist her hair up like she usually does before she catches herself and stops, looking herself over in the looking glass before she deems herself respectable enough to go find Wyman. The sun is just about to peek over the horizon, and she won’t be late. A touch to her breast pocket to make sure the bone charm is still there—it is—and she looks back to the bed. The man hasn’t moved, but she does go to him to idly straighten a lock of his hair that’s fallen forward onto his mask. Emily kisses his cheek before she turns and walks away—no 'thank you' needs saying, he can see how she’s walking, and so she closes the door without remorse and without thought of how he might feel.

Back in the bar, it’s hard to miss her lover.

“There you are!” Wyman says, one hand fisted in a bag made of someone’s shirt, all knotted up by the sleeves and doubtlessly full of ill-gotten gains. Emily can hear it jingling as it shifts. She kisses Wyman’s cheek and settles against her lover’s side. Outside, fireworks light up the Gristol dawn.

“Happy eighteen forty-seven,” Wyman intones seriously, and Emily laughs, throwing an arm around Wyman’s waist.

“Come on, let’s get back. Father will be worrying.”

Wyman nods, and they both stand, walking easily hand in hand and out into the brand-new year. The man in the back room falls out of her thoughts easily—the Fugue Feast, after all, is outside of time. Much more real and important is her lover, and the High Overseer's voice ringing out over the rooftops.


	2. I: Upper Aventa, Karnaca, 1852

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I accidentally Kirin Jindosh redemption arc.

The floor starts shifting under her, and a voice, tinged with static, rings out of the speakers. It takes her fractions of a second to find the source, and more to realize where she knows it from.

(“Ah, someone’s activated one of the mechanisms in my house—”)

It’s a voice she never thought she’d hear again, though it had crossed her mind on the _Wale_ as they came into port: wouldn’t it be funny if she met the man from the Feast five years ago, again. He _had_ said he was from Karnaca, hadn’t he? Crossed her mind in the odd, half hysteric way she was having a lot of thoughts lately, biting back laughter and tears at the same time, and only ever when she alone in her cabin whilst she was sure Meagan couldn’t hear. She blamed all her odd thoughts on having a Mark of the Outsider newly burned into the back of her hand and a father made of stone. Meagan had said little on the Grand Inventor on the ship and then on the way over, but the message had come across clear as day despite her brevity: Kirin Jindosh was nuttier than the sailors that tied themselves to a mainsail during a storm in an attempt to win the Outsider’s favor.

 Emily _reaches_ , narrowly avoiding the clockwork soldier as it comes to attention, going backwards up the stairs. She winces as the soldier jumps an astonishing distance, but keeps herself quiet despite that, occasionally sneaking glances behind herself while the voice rattles on.

“—I’m Kirin Jindosh, but you must know that—”

KJ, from the tobacco case. _Kirin Jindosh._

Coming to Karnaca has certainly resulted in a plethora of new experiences and revelations being brought to light nearly faster than she can handle them.

Nearly.

The Outsider, meanwhile, is probably cackling with glee. She can imagine the sound. If he gives her a moment to speak when she's next at one of his shrines, she won't ignore the chance to ask if he was the orchestrator of this particular coincidence. He may be the Leviathan, but she’s the best parts of Corvo Attano and Jessamine Kaldwin distilled by rage and determination, and she will demand an accounting. And if she wants to do that, she’s going to have to get out of here. Breathe, Emily, she reminds herself. She can do this. She knows she can.

She gambles—yanks the scarf down from over her mouth and nose, still listening intently for the tick-tick-tick winding of the soldier. The last thing she needs is for him to recognize the woman he knew from the Feast. If he recalls the anonymous woman from that night at all still. He must see the Empress first, and be overwhelmed by that instead of matching the eyes to the ones from under the Feast mask. And she mustn’t speak. Her hand checks her hair, the ring on her finger, the wrapping over the Mark. Sure she’s composed, she turns towards the doorway before her and walks towards it, raising herself out of her crouch. It cannot be so easy as simply taking him out here and now, but—she can hope.

Any lingering doubt she might have held fast to in those moments between vanishes once she glimpses his face as he walks towards her through the enclosed bridge. Her earlier—years earlier—suppositions about the overall shape of his face prove mostly true. It isn’t as harshly masculine as, say, her fathers’, instead, fine boned and sharp. His clothes are mostly the same cut and style as she remembers. His hand—it takes her a moment to realize as he brings it to his mouth that the thing’s some contraption made of ceramic. A pipe? Between then and now, he’s lost two of his fingers. How has that affected his craft? More importantly, does it give him a handicap in a fight?

“—All that, and you have your father’s eyes. Welcome, Your Imperial Majesty. Welcome, Lady Emily Kaldwin,” Jindosh mocks, the discordance between the speaker and his voice, right there on the other side of the glass, layered and strange. At least his bow is low, even though it’s meant to taunt her.

She stands, steel in her spine, mute, and thanks the Outsider—who else might she raise her praise to?—for the Royal Mint's prolific range of coinage featuring her face, that he thinks of her father when he sees her, and doesn’t need to go searching to place her features.

It’s not embarrassment driving this desire to keep him from connecting the Feast to this day.

Delilah has her throne, Delilah has nearly everything. All her shame is too busy making her sick for what happened because of her own stupidity to be focused on what occurred at the Feast. It is instead—well, simply put, she does not know if it _means_ anything. If their past meeting will prove useful to her in any way. If embarrassment will color his reaction, if that will make him inclined to send out more soldiers. An advantage she can’t afford to lose lies in his likelihood of underestimating her, to think her a spoiled girl, for which she doesn’t need the maybe-weapon (either pointed at him or at her) of Jindosh recalling their meeting five years ago. His cockiness might well save Sokolov and herself. It could end this cleanly—or as clean as she’s trying for. Her hands have enough blood on them already. Hundreds will die in Dunwall while she is unable to protect them from Delilah and her witches.

If the memory proves to be useful, if further exposure to Jindosh guides her to believe he can be swayed by sentimentality (unlikely) she can always reveal it later.

There’s no way to make a said thing unsaid. 

Her keeping silent has caught his attention. He waits for a moment more, staring at her as she stares at him, as if expecting her to respond—as if her participation would have been anything but a break in his monologue. It’s—confused him. His movements are a bit less theatrical. Does he think everyone has the same desire to pontificate as he does?

That glass door won’t be between them forever. She waits, the fingers of her Marked hand occasionally twitching as the Void whispers to her, calls her to call upon it.

“I’d assume my involvement with the Duke brought you to my door. Or maybe you’re after the washed-up Anton Sokolov, comfortably residing in the Assessment Chamber. Either way, come find me, and take whatever it is you seek.” He takes a drag from his pipe, and she wonders who packs it for him. Does he have two prosthetics?

“But if you fall, I’ll have your body carried to my lab for dissection and study. Until either comes to pass, your secret is safe with me.”

He’s done now, turning his back on her, and he flips a switch over on the other side of the door. His earlier, brief show of concern when she kept silent is swept away by his ego soon enough, which is acceptable to her. It’s time to go hunting. The floor opens, and she dives down into the safety of the innards of the house, passing a soldier just as it starts to wake. The click of the gears chills her blood, but she dives behind a wall before it can see her, the space around her tinted red from the glow of the electric coils. 

* * *

Finding Sokolov is easy—after all, Jindosh told her exactly where he was. It’s only a matter of a harrowing few minutes of reaching and swallowing the feeling of her heart in her throat ( _murmured thanks to the Outsider_ ) before she finds him, and wonders if he looked so old, his skin so paper-thin the last time she saw him. He manages a few words and she lets him preserve his dignity before he passes out. Her hand stays on his for a few stolen seconds. He feels so _fragile_. Sokolov was old when she was a child, but he’s always been there, a monolith throughout her life, lecturing, steady.

 The memory of him here will scar.

She is gentle as she guides him over her shoulder, secures him so she won’t jostle too much while she moves, her Marked hand free. Her ear is pressed to his ribs; she can feel them through the thin jacket he has on and is thankful that Jindosh’s home is warm and dry.  He’s too light, but she can’t help but appreciate it as she retraces her steps, remembers how she came, breathes. Back through the walls—there are near misses once or twice, but she makes it back to where she started, the room just outside the hall where she saw Jindosh, and she settles Anton—Sokolov, mustn’t think of him as a mere _human_ simply because she’s seen him much too vulnerable— against the wall, all within the safety of the inner workings of the house. As her hands tilt his head, she glances up, following what might have been the sound of bloodflies.

She was _concerned_ in Gristol. She’s paranoid, now, a certain kind of awareness that has honed her in combat. As she glances up towards the sound—all it is is a fan spinning idly, clicking against the metal of its cage—she wonders how Karnaca will have changed her once she returns to Dunwall.

Because she will return to Dunwall. Jindosh is just another name on a list, and if she found a way past Grim Alex, a way to save Hypatia—Corvo did not speak about it often, but the truth of what he had done during the Plague, how the only deaths on his hands had been a guard who looked up at the wrong moment and a handful of Weepers he had felt pity for—she wants to be as good as he was. As merciful.

Emily checks her supplies before she slips back inside the walls, back the way she came, fingers hovering over the sleep darts to count—one, two—the bullets, the angle of her mask, and she makes a choice. It is not based on the amount of evidence someone like Sokolov would like her to gather before risking it. Sokolov, she suspects, will hate it, as will Meagan. It does not have the layers of binding protocol that Callista would like. Corvo—her father—would understand, she supposes, moving along the walkway that looms over the glass-walled Assessment Chamber. The click of a guard’s footsteps has her falling into a shadow and making for a rat hole, pleased when the crackle of the wall of light passes her by and she emerges on the other side with the guard not at all the wiser. There is the alluring song of a bone charm, but Emily bites the inside of her cheek and ignores it, striding forward.

 Corvo would understand wanting to find another way.

She hears the clockworks before she sees them, the grinding of gears and clicking that announces them, and reaches for the chandelier that hovers above the entire workspace before even glancing at the assortment of stations he’s arranged around the bottom floor. Settled above everything, she can see the two clockworks patrolling, and Jindosh speaking to himself about—Sokolov? And a machine, an electroshock machine—

 “Subject continues to show _bothersome resistance_ to the Electroshock machine,” Jindosh dictates to an audiograph recorder, his head bent over the desk as he fusses with… something. Above him, watching over the whole of the lab, is a picture of Sokolov, painted by Sokolov. Her fingers rest on the rim of the chandelier, and she breathes lightly as to not risk detection. “An abnormal strength of will? Stubbornness? Despite repeated exposures at a low to moderate level, he has retained his wit and acerbic tongue, though I am beginning to wish to be done with the whole affair and turn the machine as high as it will go. The destruction of his intelligence will be a loss the Duke will… dislike, but there’s no reason the same goals might be achieved with time, even without Sokolov’s mind.”

The Heart ( _her mother’s heart_ ) whispers to her: “ _He has a great mind, for innovation, invention, progress. Perhaps even greater than Sokolov_.”

The soldier clicks past, at her back, now, and she remains unseen. Jindosh, without looking up from his work, hits a button on the recorder, and shuts it off. Now, while he’s distracted, another reach, boots landing as soft as snowfall on the floor. Her gun, pulled out of the holster, cocked; finger on the trigger guard and then placed to his temple, her other hand—her sword hand—at his throat.

“Call them off, Jindosh,” she says.

She does not know how long it takes for him to put the whole of it together, to realize. First comes that he’s unsafe, then the realization that someone has breached his inner sanctum, then (and he’s a smart man, with a good handle of detail) that he has heard that voice before, and the when and where of it come together all at once. She feels his throat bob against her palm as he swallows, the shift of his collar against her wrist as he tries to turn his head to look at her. Her hand tightens, nails at his throat, and he stops. But the clockwork soldiers _have_ noticed, have turned their bodies towards their creator. One jumps, a horrible, unnatural movement. It lands hard on the floor, click-click-clicking as it leans forward.

Emily is not so stupid as to assume him willing to try being reasonable beyond ensuring the clockworks don't butcher him as well, but she is soothed somewhat when he speaks.

“S-stop. Enter sleep state.”  All at once, the clockworks stand up straight like a guardsman at attention, and the whirring slows—and then stops. There is an electric hum from the lower level, but it’s surprisingly quiet. Emily shifts her stance, and then takes a moment to look over Jindosh’s desk. Nothing particularly interesting—sheets and sheets of calculations and notes, but nothing she can decipher at first glance. There’s the massive portrait of Sokolov behind them, and she thinks of the man himself and all that Jindosh had done to him. Her finger twitches against the trigger guard.

Corvo hadn’t—her memories of fifteen years ago are oddly stunted, some moments crystal-clear and enshrined, and others are blurry. There are gaps that he’s filled in, things she doesn’t remember or wasn’t there for at all, memories her father has told her in the quiet, serious way he uses when he wants her to take them to heart while still trying to avoid preaching, lest she ignore him.

(“There’s a time for death,” the Corvo in her head says, solemn, watching her as she reads over the warrant in her office, pen hovering over the signature line during an afternoon from so long ago. “And then there are the times where living is the harsher punishment.”)

Her mother’s heart thumps near her own, and she’s not sure if it’s the rune nearby or some imagined sign.

Sokolov had been one such act of double-edged mercy, but it had all turned out alright for it. Better, even, because he’d cured the Plague and done ten thousand good things beside that. She doesn’t pretend Jindosh is cut from the same cloth—disconcerting rumors about his proclivities aside, his yearning is for discovery at any cost, not the greater good. He can’t be motivated by the same pleas Sokolov was, and even if she had a small child to draw him pictures and ask him endless questions—it wouldn’t give her the desired result. Emily is absolutely sure of this.

That leaves one thing.

Emily pulls the gun away, slides her hand off his throat and steps back, one fluid movement, her Mark burning, ready to jump if he tries something foolish. She doesn’t let the tightness in her shoulders show as she speaks, staring right at him.

“Bet on the winner, Jindosh. Delilah is slipping. And don’t tell me you wouldn’t relish the chance to best the Duke.”

He stares at her, and a hand, unbidden, comes up to rub his throat, sliding under his collar. He continues to watch her as she turns her attention to his desk. The soldiers have started up again, turning away and resuming their patrols, their backs to her and Jindosh, but she doesn’t doubt that avian head is still watching. There’s a small box, lights next to the names of rooms, little grids that light up, needles and gauges that indicate—

“Scales. Pressure sensors,” Jindosh says. “Recording devices. I could hear you breathing. You were so light, at times—you would move _so quickly_ that the machines were fooled into thinking you were in two places at once.”

She supposes he is asking for an explanation or an elaboration as to how she did any of that, but the secret of her Mark has so far just been entrusted to Meagan—necessary, as what better place than the _Wale_ to practice her jumps and reaches?—but Jindosh, no. He’s on a knife’s edge of still wanting to dissect her, and the silvergraphs of the four of them—Jindosh, the Duke, _Grim Alex_ , and Ashworth— aren’t for show. Emily doesn’t need any instruments to see how his eyes track her, how his hands twitch at his side; tiny aborted movements.

“ _It is important to him. He wants others to notice the complexity of his work_ ,” the Heart sings. “ _He longs for an adversary worthy of him._ ”

Emily is not sure that the leash she possesses is strong enough to bind him to her. She has had her fill of men brooding over her power and her fortune, and knows well enough how to play them off one another for the best possible outcome. This is the job of an Empress; especially a young, unmarried one. Wyman has her heart—will always have her heart, or so she hopes, but she knows there must always be a degree of availability to her. This adversary that Jindosh longs for—she can’t be that. She’s clever, but she’s not the sort of mechanically minded brilliant that Jindosh wants to set himself against.

Nor does he want for sycophants to coo over his accomplishments. He has likely been called genius since he was small.

Sokolov’s painted eyes bore down on her back. She turns her attention from the desk and then to Jindosh. He is still standing there, waiting, and he has regained some of his confidence in that he is now staring at her crossbow, the mines strapped to her belt, the armory she has made of her outfit.

“I would like a drink,” she says, instead. He’s poor, he comes from nothing; a charity case at the Academy because of his brilliance. The arrogance of aristocracy will do nothing for her; she is yet balancing on his memories to win him over or at least to keep him still curious.

And—it does. It seems to shock him, anyway. His eyes narrow, for just a moment, and then he recovers.

“Very well,” he says, and it seems like he’s surprised even himself, a twist to his mouth as he turns and walks over to call the elevator. Emily, displeased she can’t just hop the rail to the bottom level, follows behind. Her boots click nicely on the wood floor, echoing, and she guesses that his hackles are raised at having not heard that before she had him so nicely cornered.

She doesn’t like the enclosed space of the lift; from the moment the doors close until they open again with a very loud ding on the bottom level, she's uncomfortable. He leads her down a hallway that quickly evolves from stark, undecorated walls—fireproof, she reasons—to plush carpet flooring and the vista of windows that has her looking down over the city.

There’s a little room, too, another typewriter and scattered debris. Jindosh walks on ahead but the packrat instincts that have so far had her grabbing every piece of junk she comes across won’t let her walk past that stun mine just _laying_ there, within reach, and she takes a detour to enjoy the view. Quick fingers nab it and secure it in place alongside her sisters, but rather than rejoin Jindosh right away (he’s still walking down the hallway) her eyes fall on a piece of paper atop a nearby stack.

She reads through it quickly—he speaks of _legacies_ , and his hopes—and before he can hear the lack of footsteps, she snatches it too, folding the paper and pressing it to an inside pocket against her breast.

Jindosh, meanwhile, has gained more than a few steps on her. He pauses to look over his shoulder and thus sees her as she’s stepping back out.

“You have a lovely home,” she says, the practiced platitudes coming easily to her. “A perfect view of Karnaca.”

Jindosh, lips twisted back into a smirk, replies. “The best view, Lady Kaldwin.” 

He twists the knife so casually, but she tamps down on her pride and temper far more easily since she came to Serkonos, and reverts to following him.

The hall opens up to a room, and the bathroom is—there’s a tub, a proper tub, not dunks overboard off the _Wale_ and sunning herself dry on the hot iron sides, and soft towels next to Jindosh’s folded shirts. He takes hold of a lever before she can linger too long on the thought of proper amenities. The room starts to turn and she steps forward lest she be left behind, standing on the platform as it spins—and deposits them, Jindosh and her, before two members of the Grand Guard, one pulling books from a shelf and leafing through them, and the other turning from toying with the torso of a clockwork hung against a wall. 

“Oh,” Jindosh murmurs, as if genuinely flummoxed, but Emily—

Emily _moves_ , linking the two guards together with a pulse of energy, stepping behind the man and locking her arm about his throat, pulling tight and holding. He gags, sputters, heels kicking uselessly at the floor. The woman, meanwhile, reaches for her pistol, and it all seems to be happening so slowly to Emily. She spares a look to Jindosh, who is gaping, open-mouthed, even as the man goes slack and the woman crumples a moment later.

There is the click-click-whir of the clockwork coming to life before them, but Jindosh snaps back to himself in time to babble; “Sleep state,” and the world resumes a normal speed.

Wasting no time, she slings the man over her shoulder and steps forward, smoothly grabbing the woman’s arm to drag her along, through a door that leads past a desk and into a little lounge. She dumps the man on a couch, and the woman beside him.

Behind her, Jindosh offers an excuse before she could even so much as fix him with a look to demand one.

“They were only supposed to be patrolling the hallway,” Jindosh states, eyes narrowed. He’s stealing pointed glances at her hand—and then back the way they came, trying to decide if the snooping or the magic matters more. She realizes now, however briefly, that what they had walked into had been his bedroom. Jindosh apparently decides that whatever the guard were up to matters most at this moment, Emily trailing after, rubbing the sore spot on her hand. She has very few tricks left in her after all this mansion has demanded of her.

Jindosh makes first for the carcass of the clockwork that the man was looking at, his fingers busy as he bends over, lost to the world. Emily, meanwhile, for lack of anything better to do, goes through the books.

Most are innocent enough—there is a copy of _The Young Prince of Tyvia_ , spine unbroken, but the rest are journals. She flicks through one—ah, here is something she understands, if barely, about electricity and magnets and the links between the two, all in Jindosh's spidery handwriting. Gently, she places it back with the others, and turns to look at him.

Void knows why he’s so arrogant as to have these insights into his mind out like this in plain sight, instead of hidden in his lab. It’s easy to put together why those two guards were snooping in his private chambers, and even easier to know who sent them. No one would risk snooping in this place without the assurance of a lack of consequences from the Grand Inventor.

There's a snap of electricity, and Jindosh yanks his hand out of the cage of the torso, shaking it to ward off the pain.

“They’re not here to steal your silver. Did the Duke send them?” she asks, and the bitter twist of his lips gives her all the answer she needs. She takes a step forward, and Jindosh, reflexive, inches back and nearly into the row of silvergraphs he's set up to take stills of the clockwork torso in motion.

“He knew I’d come for you,” for Sokolov, really, but schematics. “He knew there would be a time where you’d be distracted, or dead, and what better time to steal your work? You’re expendable to him, Jindosh. He’ll have someone else pick up where you left off the moment he tires of you.”

“It would take _years_ —” Jindosh hisses out, and she cuts in.

“It could be done,” Emily states, calmly. “He would throw money and blood into it, as much as it took, and someone else would take your work. He’d place them in this house if it pleased him, paper over your name in every book with theirs.”

His brows draw together, a stubborn set to his lips. The defensive posture to his shoulders from the shock still hasn’t melted away. Nothing Emily’s said has been wrong, and he knows it. The Duke is using Jindosh, and Jindosh is using him, but the Duke still has enough resources to swat Jindosh like a bloodfly, should he wish it.

He turns his back to her, and makes for the balcony. She steps after him, but stops at the archway, watching as he pours himself a glass full of whiskey and knocks it back like it’s water.

“Old Dunwall,” he says, pouring himself a second glass, a sedate few fingers. “I expect you are familiar.”

Not seeing any reason to linger, she comes forward. He pours her a glass too, somewhere between his first and second serving in terms of generosity, and hands it to her. He holds it for a little longer than is strictly needed, and they watch one another before he lets her go. Emily perches on the railing, straddling it, one leg dipping over the edge and into the chasm below, her back against the pillar. This view of the city, of the sunset is even better than the one in the glass walled room. Jindosh has chosen one of the lawn chairs for himself. He sits back in it, but not before unholstering his pistol—she watches attentively during that—and sliding it out of arm’s reach.

She does not offer the same hospitality.

“Now that we’re being civilized, I don’t expect you have any more guidelines to my _very dangerous_ double-cross of the new witch Empress and her powerful friends?” Jindosh drawls out, a new tiredness to him.

“I don’t kill you—”

“Well, one would _hope_ , after all this, Lady Kaldwin—”

“ _I don’t kill you_ ,” she starts again, leaning towards him. “—for all you did to Sokolov, and the rest of your test subjects, and whatever you did in Delilah or the Duke’s name up to today, and you—stall. On your clockworks, on any other weapon the Duke or Delilah or any of her associates ask you to make, on any aid you might offer them. If you give them anything, make it with subpar parts, something that will break or malfunction during a fight. Give them weak spots. You’re smart enough to make them look accidental.”

“Is that all?” His brows rise, he takes a swallow of his drink; she still hasn’t touched hers.

“No,” Emily says, finding herself. “I’ll want reports, too. Who the Duke meets, anyone of interest visiting any of his inner circle.”

Jindosh toys with his glass for a moment, fingers sweeping over the rim and setting it down on the edge of the table before looking back at her. “And what do I get in return for this? These are very powerful people you’re asking me to betray.”

“Your life,” she says, and ignores his scoff, how his mustache wrinkles with his lip. “Your mind. I could put you in the chair like you did with Sokolov—” That one actually makes him tense, makes his hands curl around the arm of the chair, good, the thought did occur to her. “A position in Dunwall, after all of this. Readmission to the Academy of Natural Philosophy. They banned you for life, didn’t they?”

He laughs. “What makes you think I would want to go grovel before them again? I have no desire to play student to those fools.”

“An honorary degree, then,” she continues, smoothly. “Being handed to you by the head of the Academy. All the pomp and ceremony for it that you want.” Emily searches for the woman’s name but can’t call it to mind. If this is what it takes to bring Jindosh over, she’ll make it happen. “Everyone who ever doubted you there; forced to celebrate your accomplishments.”

There. By the way his eyes light up, she has him.

“Better,” Jindosh says, and leans back in the chair again, looking past Emily to the vista. “Not quite as generous as the Duke’s terms, but considering his plans to replace me…”

“You won’t find a better one,” Emily says firmly. “And if I find you’re acting in bad faith, I’ll—“

“ _Again_ with the threats of violence, Lady Kaldwin.” He shakes a finger at her, the prosthetic one, and her hand curls tighter around the whiskey glass. “I understand the inclination, especially considering the circumstances of your mother’s death. I’ve been told she bled out before you. What was it like, to see that at such a young, tender age?”

Emily of a few months ago might have raged at him, might have hissed that Jindosh ought to mind his tongue, but Emily of today grinds her heel into the impulse and takes a drink instead. The whiskey tastes like home in some unidentifiable way. It’s what Wyman drinks, and she aches for a moment to think of the safe room, and afternoons spent there, ignorant of all else outside.  

She hopes Wyman is safe. She wishes she had some way to risk another letter, but—

“It was a formative experience,” she agrees. “I learned a great deal from it.”

Disappointed that she did not rise to the needling attack, Jindosh frowns. “I suppose you’d like some token of goodwill, to seal this little alliance.”

“That would be nice,” she agrees.

“Anton Sokolov, then—”

“ _No_ ,” she says, swinging her leg over the bannister and setting her glass down beside her. “He’s mine, now. If you wanted to keep him, you should have put more in my way.”

Not that the various guards and clockworks hadn’t been a significant deterrent—there were charms and runes in this house, and Emily hadn’t taken even _one_ for risk of being seen. Or any coin, or that nice piece of scrimshaw she’d passed.

“You knew why I was here. Who I was here for. Your—instruments told you where I was. You could have alerted the guards, your clockworks. You chose not to. _He’s mine_ ,” she finishes.

Jindosh’s face is pinched; he’s regretting his lapse, and in that moment, she realizes, stands—

“You _knew_ ,” Emily says once more, but this time it’s an accusation, pointing with her Marked hand; the glass is knocked off the rail and tumbles to shatter on the rocks far below, out of earshot.

“You hid your identity poorly, your Imperial Majesty. I lived in Gristol for several years. I heard your announcements, your face is on every coin, and you look so much like your poor mother—”

“When,” she says, and she is all fierceness now, the Mark singing, begging to be used, the previous exhaustion fading away in favor of adrenaline and a bubbling nausea. 

Jindosh relents. “Perhaps three weeks after,” he admits, and he won’t look at her face, choosing instead to study the bottle of whisky. “You spoke on the reopening of the Financial District, of draining it. There was to be a collaboration with the Academy. A contest for designs for a new levy, for pumps to drain the water.”

Emily doesn’t need to search her memory much to recall the speech. She had been proud of her idea at the time, the idea that she was finally undoing the rot caused by the plague and by inaction. Now, it seems paltry. Her memories of the Feast had lingered, but not often. Especially not on a day when she had been distracted—by Wyman, by her own self-importance, by a myriad of the things that made up ruling.

“You didn’t enter.” Because he would have won, if he had entered. The honor had gone to a man from Morley by the name of Duncan. Him, she remembered more clearly, because she’d worked with him in the years following. He had used the prize purse to fund his education and moved to Dunwall permanently after his term at the Academy. She spared a thought for his safety.

“I was _expelled_. Banned for life, as you yourself pointed out.”

She doesn’t ask why. He’ll pontificate at length, if given the chance. He seems the type. He—needs admiration, but a certain kind, and if they’re following niceties, she’ll hold back.

“I,” she says, and then stops. She has not asked ‘why’. She can summon up several answers, and has—ranked them, too, by most to least likely. Emily swallows, and pushes off the banister with her palms, weight on the balls of her feet. She does not move, yet.

“We fucked,” she says, “during a Feast. It wasn’t memorable.”

Void, please, don’t let him have obsessed over this for five years now—she doesn’t want to imagine what sort of twisted embellishments he’d put into their hour or so together given all that time to brood. Wyman’s the romantic. Emily doesn’t ascribe a particular beauty to random events, and Jindosh hasn’t seemed the type either. At all. All evidence points to him being analytical. Rational.

“Breanna Ashworth,” he states. “She and I have been working on a device for Delilah. If you remove her, there will be a great deal fewer questions as to why the projects the Duke assigns suffer unexpected delays.”

“Thank you.”

She tugs the mask back over her nose and mouth, shifting it until she’s satisfied with the placement and sure it’ll keep the Dust and smell of the lower district out. Emily rolls her shoulders and measures the distance between the balcony off to the left. She can manage it easily, and it certainly won’t hurt to have Jindosh witness another reminder of her ability, her equality to Delilah. She’ll have to check the name with Meagan, but she’s seen it before.

“I look forward to seeing you, after you’ve taken care of Ashworth.”

He wants, Emily supposes, to ask her to stay. Doubt creeps up her spine—she wants Lady Boyle, or Callista to help her understand what’s happening here, the best way to play this. Sentimentality isn’t the deciding factor here—he so eagerly sent clockworks to the Tower.

Before she can think on it for any longer, she exhales, makes the leap from the ledge to a lower one, and another. Everything after that is mechanical. She doesn't need to spare much thought to crawling through the little passage, and back through the laboratory. She doesn’t bother to test the still-patrolling clockworks' hostility, keeping out of sight. She does, however, grab the vial of Addermire Solution and drink it down before discarding the empty glass in a corner.

At least the space within the house gives her an even greater silence. She finds Sokolov where she left him, breathing softly, unaware and she hoists him over her shoulder. No one stops her as she walks into the foyer and then back into the cool evening. Emily takes extra care when settling him in the carriage across from her and pulling the lever to take them back to the lower district. She will owe him an explanation. She will owe Meagan an explanation, and she will gladly take the ride back to Aventa to decide upon one.


	3. II: Dreadful Wale, Karnaca, 1852

Hypatia is watching from the stern of the _Wale_ while Meagan brings the skiff in, a little figure lit from behind by the ship’s lights. She follows them around the deck to the port side and is close enough when Megan uses the pulleys to lift the boat to hold her arms out for Sokolov even before the tow’s done raising the skiff to level with the dock. Emily’s the one to hand him off, but Meagan watches the exchange from the tiller all the while, as if she doesn’t quite believe that either Emily or Hypatia have the strength to carry him without dropping him.

“Jindosh electrocuted him,” Emily says, “repeatedly,” pulling herself out of the skiff, stepping around Hypatia so she can open doors for the doctor. “I think he’s dehydrated, too, but the food in his room wasn’t drugged, and—”

“Emily,” Hypatia says, and Emily stops, midway down the staircase, hand against the wall to slow her rapid descent down. “I will need my kit, from my room. I believe we ought to settle Dr. Sokolov in his own room, yes? And Meagan, would you kindly boil fresh water for me?”

Meagan pulls closed the iron door to the cabin in response, and then mutters, “Yeah.”

Emily’s footsteps are much more sedate as she goes to Hypatia’s quarters to take the doctor’s bag, and she hears Meagan banging around in the galley, making noise, she thinks, for the sake of making noise, because she cannot scream and rage. The bag has the heraldry of Addermire stamped across the canvas, and she slows herself as she bends to take it, looking out over the water through Hypatia’s small window.

Meagan Foster is a dangerous woman. Emily knew that from the start. Even missing an arm and an eye, she is still formidable. They are allies because of circumstance. Emily doesn’t have much warmth left in her—she was never really a sentimental person. She does not have room for it. She’s happy to leave the softness to people like Wyman and Samuel. Both of them had found their way in by being unflappably, dependably _kind_ , the sort of people the Isles needed more of—but only if the world was gentle enough not to crush them.

Meagan had none of that to recommend her, and even Emily’s most sincere overtures of companionship—playing cards, smalltalk, drinking—only bounced off Meagan’s walls. She did know when to leave well enough alone, and had. Meagan Foster wasn’t her friend. She was her patron, of sorts, her landlord, her supplier, her ally—and for all that was, she was not an ounce more.

Emily liked the woman well enough. Respected her. But she could guess how the inevitable conversation about Jindosh living was going to go, and she was not looking forward to it in the least.

Sokolov first.

She hoists the bag onto her shoulder, and uses her free hand to take a vial of Addermire Solution and an Elixir, the glass clinking as she slides back out into the hallway. The banging in the galley has stopped, but she’s sure Meagan is still in there, given how she isn’t at Sokolov’s side. She watches the doctor and her patient, hovering by the doorway for a few, precious seconds. Finally, she gathers up the courage to move, setting a hesitant foot into the room.

“Here,” she says, and hands Hypatia the satchel, gently settling the vials down on Sokolov’s desk. “I wasn’t sure if you would need—“

“Thank you, Emily,” Hypatia says, as unflappably calm as she’s ever been and yet still warm. She’s kneeling by Sokolov’s cot, stripping off his coat, a hand on the back of his head to hold him steady as she guides it off his arms. “It went well, then. I am glad.”

Emily chews on her lip, on a chapped piece of skin, and doesn’t flinch when she tastes blood.

“Yes,” she agrees. “It did.”

She crosses her legs, uncrosses them, leans more weight against the table at her back and mostly just watches Hypatia work. Hypatia, who was also one of Sokolov’s students—during the time that Jindosh was there? She knows Hypatia knew Piero, before he passed.

“Do you need anything?” Emily asks. “Help moving him?”

Hypatia reaches into her bag to pull out a stethoscope and shakes her head, a soft smile bringing some light onto her face. “No, Emily. You’ve done all you need to do. Go eat something and get some rest. Doctor’s orders.”

Emily nods, a light blush of color in her cheeks—it’s the gentlest rebuke she’s ever been given, outside of perhaps her parents, and that makes it easy to obey. She hesitates, though, at the threshold, hand on the frame, and turns back around.

“Dr. Hypatia? When is he going to be himself?”

She needs Sokolov—needs his brilliant mind the way her father needed him and Piero. Less acutely, of course, there’s no plague threatening to devour the Empire. Her only enemies are people, ideas, not nature, but Corvo had an entire conspiracy, and Emily has… herself. Meagan. Hypatia, for as long as she’ll stay, and the _Wale_.

Hypatia hesitates, looking away from her, about to speak—and then Megan shoulders past Emily.

“He’s not.”

Meagan sets the pan down on the desk, dropping the oven mitt beside it. “Here. It’s near boiling. Did you need more?”

“No, Meagan, this ought to be enough. Thank you.” Hypatia, no longer hesitating on the edge of an answer, resumes listening to Sokolov’s breathing.

Here is the truth: some part of Emily Kaldwin will always be ten years old and in the Golden Cat, on Kingsparrow, waiting for Corvo, looking up at the Pendleton brothers, crying for her mother. She loathes the way she says, “But I need him,” yet it still comes out of her mouth, leaden and childish.

Meagan’s response is near instant. The captain rounds on her, fierce and angry.

“You _stupid_ girl, you saw what Jindosh did to him, you knew it was the Crown Killer who stole him from my ship, bleeding—”

“ _Meagan_ ,” Hypatia says, raising her voice, her palm flat on Sokolov’s chest as she turns to look at the two of them. Emily, with her teeth bared, reaching for a sword she isn’t wearing, and Meagan, pointing, accusing, months of pent-up rage in her heart.

She had needed to leave Sokolov behind in Karnaca, Emily realizes, to come find her in Dunwall. This is also not the first time Hypatia and Sokolov have been in this room. The last time would have been when she—Grim Alex—took him in the dead of the night.

A moment passes. “And Emily—both of you should eat and sleep. We will speak about Sokolov—my _patient_ —tomorrow.”

Emily takes a step back, and another, before turning sharply and making for her room, glad beyond measure for whatever measure of privacy that she’s allowed. She closes the door, and keeps her back up against it, staring over the expanse of her tiny room. Emily presses the heels of her palm into her eyes and inhales through her mouth and out her nose until the burning fades and the wet hitches of breath stop. She reaches blindly for the sink and turns the tap on, splashing her face with water and turning the spray off once she feels in control. Emily rests there for a moment, staring down into the rust-stained bottom of the porcelain sink, and then mechanically begins to prepare for this like it’s just another evening.

It is meaningless to compare the rituals and routines of the Tower to her bunk on the _Wale_. Still, she goes through what steps remain in the same order—first, unpinning her hair, and then slowly stripping down to her underclothes, everything she removes placed to the side carefully.

Now, she inspects for damage, for places where the fabric is wearing thin or where seams need to be reinforced. The Sparrow costume—the impulse of so many nights ago—has held up well, to so many things. Granted, Corvo had alterations done to it, quietly, but through seawater and blood and muck, it has held the vibrant blue and gold. She folds it with a good deal of reverence. It is a tool, like her father’s sword, like her pistol. She ought to show the same respect.

The hot water tap does indeed give her water approaching warm when she turns it, and she wipes down her face with a sponge, a few quick scrubs before she moves to the rest of her body. There are so many more scars over her skin—mostly falls, in truth. Remaining unseen has proven to be more bloodless, for her and others, but the damage she has suffer numbers more in rolled ankles and skinned palms.

She sits on the side of the sink and pulls her legs over and into it before kneeling awkwardly to wash herself, mindful of the low ceiling and this awkward way of cleaning herself. A jump in the ocean would be better, but she’s hungry for the warmth and itching to get the ichor of a day in the city off her body. Emily thinks briefly of the tub in Jindosh’s mansion, and bites back idle longing.

Dumping a bucket of water over her head finishes the wash, and she swings herself back out of the shallow sink and towels herself down roughly with a spare scrap, wiping down her legs and making sure not to leave too much water on the floor as she cleans up after herself, throws on a rough nightgown and smallclothes, and crawls into the tiny bed, her damp hair sticking to her cheek.

She has not slept well since the Outsider called to her during her dreams, but exhaustion has overcome anxiety and pulled her to sleep before when little else could. Emily holds on as long as possible, face against the pillow, watching the faint light glint off the glass in the cabinet, the _Wale_ rocking back and forth, and—

Emily knows she is dreaming. The Void cannot be mistaken for anything else, even with the cloying smell of roses in the air and the vines that twist through it.

She is nearly expecting Delilah when she appears in a swirl of thorns.

Emily looks at her aunt, really _looks_ at her, straining for a hint of Jessamine in her features, or some hint of Euhorn shared between the three of them. Instead, she sees the seat of Delilah’s shoulders, the confidence that guides her steps. 

Delilah says things about Sokolov she doesn't want to believe, things about her grandfather, her mother– she ought not risk further exposure to Delilah’s temper, but she does, a protest-

“She was a child,” Emily interjects, hands curled into fists, aggressive when she shouldn't dare.

“A _child_ who condemned my mother to death, and me to the streets,” Delilah snaps back, leaning forward. The temperature of the Void drops further, and Delilah is all sharp edges, about to seize upon this new point, when Emily speaks.

“Why didn't you ever come to my mother, or me– I would have welcomed you–” Nearly had, in fact, how her heart had seized upon the word aunt and clung to it, hoping. But instead Delilah had made a ruin of her life, of Dunwall.

Softly, Delilah laughs.

 “Do you think,” her voice rises, one hand on her hip, the other a fist, “that I had any intention of doing something other than taking back what was mine by right? At my sweet sister’s court, I would forever be the poor little kitchen maid’s daughter, a constant reminder of Eurhorn’s appetites? I am Delilah Kaldwin, and I am your Empress.”

She does not stumble off the edge. Delilah does not push her. But where there was before solid footing, or what passes for it in the Void, there is nothing, and she is falling, clawing at the air, and Delilah is leaning over the edge, laughing and laughing. 

Well, she supposes. She gave nothing away about Jindosh, and unconsciousness hits her.

 

* * *

 

Dangling her feet over the side, Emily swallows, and the mashed piece of biscuit inches its way down her dry throat, an uncomfortable lump. Her head is fuzzy, and there’s pressure behind her eyes that won’t go away. She swallows another mouthful of coffee, and is glad for the early-morning cool. If this doesn’t pass by midday, she’ll need to spend the entire day indoors, eyes closed tight against the light.

She isn’t sure if the hangover is from Delilah bringing her into that odd corrupted piece of Void at all, or just the way she was thrown from it, but the Outsider’s visits don’t affect her so, meaning this is her aunt’s fault.

Her aunt.

Steps come up behind her, and she sets down the biscuit to see who’s coming up the stairs, squinting. Hypatia takes even, measured steps, while Meagan meanders behind, head hung, her remaining hand shoved into her coat pocket.

Asking after Anton is on the tip of her tongue, but she refrains, looking up at Hypatia, who gently sets down the paper in her hand on the rail beside Emily.

‘ATTEMPTED BURGLARY AT MANSION OF KIRIN JINDOSH LEAVES TWO GRAND GUARD PERSONNEL DEAD,’ and the subheading; ‘PERPETRATOR BELIEVED TO BE USURPER EMILY KALDWIN.’

She stares at it— at her own picture, a cruder sketch than any she’s seen done of herself before, one that makes her nose weasley and her eyes squinting— and then at the silvergraph of the mansion, glinting in the sunlight.

“You said,” Meagan states, “that you took care of it.”

In the article itself, there is commentary from Jindosh.

‘The Grand Inventor has reported all is well, and that that Usurper managed only to breach the front entrance hall, attempting to steal a mechanism from one of the Clockwork Soldiers. She was beaten back, and cowardly slew two of our dear Grand Guard in a fit of rage, unable to best Karnaca’s Kirin Jindosh.

The Inventor stated to reporters that all is returned to normal and reiterated full confidence in his Clockworks’ ability to defend his house against intruders, including overly curious reporters.

Mr. Jindosh has also recalled all Clockwork Soldiers currently on rotation in Karnaca, citing concerns of sabotage by those sympathetic to the Usurper.’  

It takes her only a moment to read the whole thing, and she looks up at Meagan, from Hypatia, and summoning what reserves of steel she has left, says, “I did not say I’d killed him,”

Meagan turns on her heel, shoulders hunched, and heads back belowdeck without saying a word. Hypatia watches her go, hands folded before her, and when Meagan is out of sight, exhales slowly and turns back to Emily.

“Dr. Sokolov survived the night,” she says gently. “We are past the worst of it.”

Emily looks out at the horizon, away from the city, more south still. “Good. I’m glad.”

She hadn’t wanted to ask, because the churning in her gut isn’t entirely Delilah’s fault. The guilt— and she’s stirred from her thoughts as Hypatia gently sets herself down beside her on the rail, swinging her legs over.

Emily says nothing, preferring just to stare, but Hypatia is the better woman, and does the work for her.

“Emily,” still so gently. “We need to speak about this. Anton—Dr. Sokolov is sixty-one. He experienced two traumas, one after another, and Kirin did not provide him with an attentive doctor while he was there. The Crown Killer—” Hypatia halts, and then continues, firm in her tone. “—the Crown Killer did things to him which could have killed most men. Would have killed most men, but I assume I had periods where I was more lucid, and stopped the worst of it. We are very lucky to have him. I know you were hoping for more from him, but as his doctor— he needs to stay indoors. He will never be the same.”

She swallows again, voice thick, the damned biscuit still stuck in her throat, and her eyes start to water. She is not a child, she can handle this, she is Jessamine’s heir and Corvo’s daughter, and—

“I can’t— I can’t do this alone, if I fail—” If she fails, Dunwall fails, the Isles fail, more people die. The stakes were not this high, even with Zhukov. She is Empress, but the Pendleton twins are laughing, laughing like Delilah, and she has waited for Corvo for so long, and why hasn’t he come to save her?

“You won’t fail,” Hypatia states. “You saved Anton and I, you made it out of Dunwall, and you found a solution for Jindosh— for the _problem_ of Jindosh, even if not all of us agree with it. You will handle this piece by piece, with help, and you will save your father. No one is without allies, and you have a formidable few.”

Hypatia’s arm drapes over her shoulder, and she pulls Emily to her side for something like an embrace. The doctor is solid, and smells faintly of the Solution that she created with her own hands, and warm. Emily has not been touched with affection since she fled Dunwall, and the contact settles something in her she has no name for. Her shoulders unknot, and then Hypatia releases her, and pretends not to notice when she blinks back tears.

“Thank you,” she says, turning to look at Hypatia, who nods. She is incredible, the doctor. No wonder everyone in Karnaca loves her. Brilliant and kind, and so, so steadfast. It makes the horror of what was done to her even worse.

What Delilah will be called to account for grows, and Emily shoulders the burden with a bit more ease.

“I think,” Hypatia says, “that all four of us should have another day of rest. We need Anton to discuss what we will handle next, and if I am half the doctor they say I am, he should be conscious by tomorrow. Emily, I advise you take a swim and then spend the remainder of the day resting. You look as if you haven’t had much sleep.”

She unfolds herself from her sitting position, dusting off her slacks and stepping back on deck. “So: tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow,” Emily agrees, and then, struck by a memory, says to Hypatia’s back. “Wait— I have a question.”

Hypatia obliges, half turning to look back at her, a brow raised.

"Did—” she stumbles over the wording for a moment, eventually settling. “Did Sokolov have appetites, when he was younger?”

Hypatia appears to consider, and then, after a beat, relents. “He was— is— a very famous man.  Some of it died down after the Plague, or so I suppose. I only met him after. He did…” she hesitates. “I was warned, once, being one of his female students, that he had tendencies. It would not have been something _I_ would have reciprocated, but I never witnessed that behavior, no. Why do you ask?”

“No reason,” Emily says, and turns back to looking at the horizon. She hears Hypatia’s footsteps as she walks away.


	4. III: Cyria Gardens, Karnaca, 1852

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Halfway done, which means two more chapters and an epilogue. Also, I should probably rewrite the summary?

Brenna Ashworth does not look nearly as imposing as her portrait after Emily pulls the lever. She is curled in on herself, laying on the floor, an animal seeking to protect vulnerable spots. When she unfurls, Emily is expecting hatred in her eyes, but there is nothing. Ashworth's eyes are empty, as hollow and fragile as the rest of her.

"What have you done," Ashworth says, and then, "oh, _Delilah_ ," keening, looking towards the sky through the window of the museum. "Delilah, _what has she done_?"

She has cleared the exhibit hall of all members of the coven, laid unconscious bodies behind shelves and tucked them away in unused rooms. There is no one to hear this but herself and Ashworth. Rather than flee, Emily witnesses instead, standing just outside the chalk circle.

Ashworth eventually rolls her eyes back towards Emily, slowly raising herself on one arm. Behind one of the shelves, a foot twitches, the rest of the body out of sight. Emily, who has nothing to hide from Ashworth, calmly uses her Mark to reach for the top of the shelf nearest the body, and lands in a crouch, peering down at the sleeping woman.

She has nothing to fear. It’s only a dream making the little witch move in her sleep. Satisfied, Emily hops down from the shelf, and goes back to watching Ashworth. The effort to look at where Emily was has yielded no further movement. Ashworth stares blankly ahead.

“Gloat,” Ashworth says finally. “Or be gone. The coven will wake soon; I needn’t tell you what will happen when they do.”

They have nothing left to say to one another. Emily leaves, much the way she came.

Ashworth is right. She knows what will happen when the coven wakes. And whoever seizes leadership from Ashworth will have to contend with murdering Delilah’s lover.

She needn’t fear the witches anymore, not as a unified pack.

Emily catches her breath on a beam in what appears to have been a lecture hall outsider the conservatory. She swallows down the concoction Hypatia prepared for her, and watches the Nestkeeper drag his malformed body through the hallway below. The elixir smells like dead eels and tastes bitter, but she can feel the vitality punch through her body, and the buzz of the bloodflies whines in her ears.

She aims her crossbow as she pulls a bread roll from her pack, bites into it as she pulls the trigger and the bolt hits the back of his neck. The Nestkeeper topples forward into the hive he was picking through, suddenly ablaze, and the nest catches too. The bloodflies shriek in fury, but Emily is out of their sight, and they have no outlet for their sudden anger.

“He went back inside for his son’s favorite toy,” the Heart announces. “She told him not to, but he said it would only take a moment.”

She swings her legs, watching the last of the nest burn out. Meagan is waiting for her, but she’s not particularly looking forward to the tense boat ride back. Despite Hypatia’s best efforts, and her own stilted, stiff overtures of getting things back to how they were, Meagan has a tiger under her skin, and nothing Emily can do will exorcise it. She must ride it out, and sit content in knowing that Meagan’s hatred of Delilah overrides her displeasure with Emily.

She dusts the crumbs off her pants and onto the floor far below before dropping down and reaching for the rooftop across the way with her Mark, jumping from roof to roof as easily as she did in Dunwall. No. Better now, freer, the lights behind her eyes brighter, her blood singing.

She will not praise the Outsider. The extent of her heresy is a smile behind her mask as she leaps between buildings, sure of her landing.

Meagan is where she left her, waiting down below the streets in the canals. The older woman lifts the lamp as Emily approaches, and Emily tugs her mask down in response. Billie squints at her, putting the lantern down and grabbing the tiller as Emily jumps into the boat.

“Is she dead?” Meagan asks, and Emily shakes her head. Meagan scoffs, and Emily, agitated, waits for the motor to sputter to life before she starts talking, her explanation in clipped tones.

“She’s without her powers. She won't last long without them, not when the rest of the coven can still perform witchcraft. I didn’t need to be the one to cut her throat.”

Meagan’s frowning thoughtfully when she turns back to look at Emily, right before they reach the open water of the bay.

“I can imagine the loss will be a shock to her,” the older woman says, near wistful. “So, you thought this one out?”

Meagan doesn’t mean to be cruel. Emily knows the shades of her emotion now. This is something closer to approval, even if it’s barbed.

“I’ll live with the consequences,” Emily says firmly. “This is my Empire.”

Meagan, perhaps in protest of the high-handedness, only grunts, and focuses on steering the boat the rest of the way. The water is calm, the tide on its way out, and the only waves in the harbour are from the larger vessels on their way out into the early dawn, catching fish while it’s still dark to bring back to the morning market.

“I’m going to get some sleep,” Emily says as the _Wale_ comes into view. “But tonight, I need you to take me back to the city.” Pause. “Please.”

Meagan is more focused on bringing the skiff up next to the _Wale_ smoothly, but once it’s attached to the lift, and slowly rising, she turns, looking Emily over with her remaining eye.

“Which district?”

“Aventa,” Emily says, expecting a challenge, and trying not to jut her chin forward in anticipation of one.

Meagan exhales from between her teeth, standing and pointing at Emily. “You don’t seem to understand that you’re the best hope we have of getting that witch off the throne, and with every idiotic risk you take, you lower your chances of killing Delilah and saving your father.”

She reminds herself to argue passively, to give Meagan nothing to pick at.

“I know,” she says. “We have a deal. He won’t betray me. I offered him something the Duke can’t.”

Meagan shakes her head, and swings up and onto the rail.

“You’re the Empress.”

 

* * *

 

 

Breaking into the Clockwork Mansion a second time is easier. Certainly because the definition of ‘breaking in’ doesn’t apply when one is an invited guest, but it’s not as if she’s allowed a chance to relax completely. The Grand Guard speckling the hill and the entrance present challenges when Jindosh does not. And while the interior of the building may change, the exterior doesn’t.

Remembering the access shaft for the elevator from her last visit, she avoids the guard posted by the front door and makes for it. Emily catches strands of their conversation, more sounds than words, and she’s more focused on skittering across the glass roofing to try and pick them apart. The metal latticing takes most of her weight without complaint, and she sees the small balcony perhaps thirty feet below her once she crests the roof.

She steps forward. The ground surges towards her, but she pulls herself down, her Mark tingling. Emily hits the ground in a crouch, knees taking the impact. She hit the ground with barely enough force to stir the dead vegetation.

“Alright, Jindosh,” she says. “Where are you?”

The sun glints off the glass roof, and she squints past the glare to the porch towards her left. His private quarters are up on that level, and his lab at her back. Emily turns and takes the few paces to the wall behind her, then spins on her heel and makes for the edge in a sprint. She flings her arm out before her, fingers curled, and reaches, throwing her body out over the chasm just as the Void alights under her skin and yanks her forward.

Feline-dainty, she sticks her landing for the second time today. She can’t hear any Grand Guard, just the faint whir of a fan, and crosses from the balcony into his bedroom proper. On the map of the mansion, everything was more abstract. Now, in the parts of the house only he and the help would see, curiosity strikes her. Lingering is out of the question, but she does trail her fingers over the bedspread as she walks by, admire the photography set up he has on the far wall. She curls her finger around the lever, and pulls.

The room turns smoothly, well-oiled joints spinning the platform past a wall and gliding to a stop in a new segment. She steps onto solid ground, expecting a comment from Jindosh. His laboratory is just down the hall, but she freezes when she hears gears grinding.

It was hidden behind a folding screen. Stuck in the corner, possibly in the middle of a repair, given how haphazardly everything in his personal quarters seems to be strewn about. The curve of its beak leers over the rim of the screen, rising to life. Stupid, she reminds herself, extending her sword as the clicking whir starts. All the better she didn’t hear anyone else. Fights with these were so loud.

Its head jerks up.

“Profile detected. Welcome, Lady Kaldwin,” it says. Or- Jindosh said into some audiograph, days ago. “Nonhostile.”

The head follows her as she rises out of a fighting stance and retracts her sword. Loathe to turn her back, she must to walk down the hallway. It is not so much that she does not trust Jindosh as that she cannot turn off the primal voice in the back of her head at the sight of them. They move too much like live things, as if one day they will throw off commands entirely and slaughter without care or cause.

When the hallway forms an ‘L’ and she is out of the Clockwork’s line of sight, she is soothed. The wall of light he has here is powered down— another little advantage of not playing cat-and-mouse this time. He’s made the way ready for her, and she’s in a good mood as she comes into his laboratory proper.

The two Clockworks on patrol halt the moment her footfalls echo on the floor, heads grinding around. “Profile detected—” one starts, and then the other, an eerie chorus off from harmony by only a few seconds. They repeat the greeting of the earlier solider, and then return to their walks.

Jindosh, at his desk, does not look up from whatever he’s tinkering with. By the time she makes it to his desk and sits herself on the side to his right, he looks as if to be finishing up. He sets his tools down, wipes off his hands, and then looks up at her, tenting his fingertips.

“Lady Kaldwin,” he says, lips curling. “What a pleasure.”

There is a difference between him being difficult on purpose and being a natural philosopher. She’s seen it before, in Sokolov, in Piero. Where whatever your hands were occupied with was far, far more important than any live person in the room. Hypatia tended to be better at observing social norms, but even she wouldn’t stop for Emily if she was in the middle of a task and Emily just happened to walk in. Jindosh, serving mostly the upper classes by this point, relishes making the nobility wait for him. This was not that.

“Jindosh,” Emily replies.

He reaches forward and grasps the bottom of her scarf and tugs it down off her face.

“Manners, Lady Kaldwin. You did promise me a civilized partnership.” He leans back in his chair.

She frowns, and ignores the feeling of exposure at the loss of her mask. “Ashworth is taken care of.”

“A lovely piece of work.” He smiles. “I applaud your ingenuity. Yes, Breanna is unlikely to recover from that. The coven did leave her alive, you know. Delilah refuses to look at her now.”

Emily shrugs. Already, her hands wander— there’s a dismantled stun mine on his desk. She takes it into her hands and turns it over. “Ashworth made her choice when she joined Delilah. She’d have had no sympathy for you if she knew about our partnership.”

“No. She would not,” Jindosh agrees, easy. “But Breanna never had much sympathy for any man. So, Lady Kaldwin— who’s next on your little list?”

“Do you really need to know?”

“You’ve ostensibly drafted me into your ‘service’ because you see some merit in having one of Delilah’s inner circle on your side.” He pauses. “ _Former_ inner circle. You have a mole. I have plenty of suggestions as to how to erode her control of the city. I helped build it.”

Disgust crosses her features and she pushes up and off the desk, standing.

“You presume too much,” she says. She hates the idea of being used by him. Emily would take Meagan’s advice over his— will take her advice, and Hypatia’s, and Anton’s. Doubtless, Meagan had someone in mind, bolstered by Hypatia and Anton’s input.

So why had she come here? Jindosh would have known of Ashworth's state because of his position, even if the papers said nothing.

“You haven’t thanked me,” Emily notes, eyes narrowing.

“Her removal from the stage benefited you as well. It wasn’t exactly selfless,” he drawls. She’s still holding the remains of the stun mine, some of the metal digging into her palm. She sets it down on the corner of his desk, and turns her attention to the painting of Sokolov behind him. She can hear him moving the chair so he can keep looking at her.

“What about your life?” she says, looking up to Anton’s face. She doesn’t know why Jindosh mounted the painting so high on the wall. His former mentor is looking down on him as he works. It can’t be that motivating.

“Are we to play this game every time?” he scoffs. “Am I to beg for mercy whenever we meet? If it’s a fight you want, my Clockworks—”

“Will they all be like that now?” She cuts him off, turning back around. He’s recalled them all to the mansion, like the paper said, but she cannot imagine him altering them all.

The sneer retreats. “No. Only the ones in my personal quarters. Even the Duke would notice if they all greeted you by name. They will, perhaps, hesitate for a second before they strike.”

“It made things less complicated,” she admits, glad of the inaction of the one stationed in the bathroom. “Thank you.”

He lets out a disgusted noise, and then turns back around in his chair, taking the abandoned stun mine and returning it to its position on his desk. Jindosh takes up his tools again, returning to work on the small device he had when she first came in.

She watches him fiddle with the inner workings, and places her hand on his left shoulder. A placement turns into a caress, inching towards his throat. His fingers still at the moment she runs her thumb over the curve of his jaw, and while she does need to step forward and turn his face towards her, she has the whole of his attention by the time he meets her eyes. His hands still, and he sets down his tools.

“Is this where we will keep finding ourselves, Lady Emily? With your hands around my neck?” He drawls through the words, his palms resting flat on the desk. “You will forgive me for not being amused by the third time.”

“The second time,” she corrects him. Before he has time to look confused— “You’re right. We’re done for the day.”

There was no real reason for her to come.

“Unless,” she amends. “— you’d be interested in having me stay?”

She has an itch under her skin, a restlessness that she’s not even sure she can entirely blame on the Mark. She feels a constant prickle on the back of her neck. Delilah is everywhere. In her dreams, her face plastered on posters every few feet in the city proper; there is nowhere Emily can go to be truly rid of her. Not until she retakes the throne.

But in Jindosh’s deathtrap of a house, she could be persuaded to take her boots off for a while. It’s not the _Wale_ , the only place she’d chance a night's sleep, but Jindosh is likely at least half as paranoid as she is, and prepared to deal with witches.

His expression shifts from annoyance to interest, and when she leans in to kiss him, she finds him pliant and receptive to her touch. His mouth opens at the the slightest encouragement. Her grip does not tighten around his throat towards anything close to actual discomfort or real threat, though she isn’t shy in using it to guide him into rising out of his seat so that the height disparity doesn’t strain her neck.

The last time she bedded someone was months ago. Between her midnight adventures and the occasional romp, she’d had no outlets that set her blood running hot in Dunwall. Karnaca edged more towards the constant adrenaline of fights and barely-escapes. Sliding a sword through someone’s heart was less relaxing than fucking someone to near exhaustion, and her midnight runs weren’t for pleasure anymore. This would be.

She pulls away, letting her hand run along Jindosh’s cravat rather than grip.

“Stay,” Jindosh says.

Emily nods. She’s sure there’s color in her cheeks too. Jindosh is finishing setting his desk to rights, standing up and out of his chair and organizing the papers scattered over his desk. She knows how to return to his rooms and hugs the rail as she starts around the circle.

About to cross paths with the first Clockwork on patrol, Jindosh catches up with her, his strides long.

“There is a cot on the lower—”

“I am not,” Emily says firmly. “— fucking you on a cot. You have a bed. I saw it.”

The Clockwork pauses as they pass it, and they exit the library, the rug muffling their steps.

By the time they’re back in the revolving trio of rooms, Emily has come to a few conclusions. They’re in a house. A rather well-appointed one. Jindosh has good taste, and the latest innovations in plumbing—

“May I use your tub?” She stops in front of the lever, looking at the bathroom before her. There’s salt on her hair and her skin, a consequence of bathing in the ocean off the side of the _Wale_. As much as he might enjoy tasting that on her, she can’t help but feel as though there’s a layer of grime on her. The dust from the mines didn’t exactly help, nor did wearing this outfit day in and day out.

Jindosh stops moving, and then nods. Emily wastes no time in starting to undress. There’s a small table and chairs off to the side; she places her jacket over the back before removing her arsenal of weapons. She takes a great deal of care with her father’s sword, then moves to the rest. Her boots she lines up neatly by the chair, and it’s when she’s starting on her trousers that she remembers the Clockwork from before.

It’s still hiding behind the screen. It knows where she is in the room. Slowly, she stops, her fingers on her belt. Jindosh has settled into another chair, toying with an apple from a bowl of fruit.

“I want it out of the room.”

Jindosh looks from her to the Clockwork and grins lazily. “Oh, Lady Kaldwin, why so modest? It can’t record.”

She unbuckles the belt anyway, tugging it free, and steps out of her pants, eyes on the floor as she rolls down her stockings. “I didn’t know you were an exhibitionist, Jindosh.”

“I am many things,” Jindosh says, still relishing in her discomfort. Or in the show of her undressing, though it’s hardly distracting by her own measure. She leaves him nothing to savor as she unbuttons her shirt.

“Still,” he says, looking over the Clockwork once more, brows furrowed. “I can see your... point. Solider, leave this room. Return to the laboratory.”

It wasn’t off, then. She grits her teeth as it jerks to attention and steps out from behind the screen and down the hall, slowly as it goes. She watches to make sure it’s turned down the hallway before undoing her breast band and stepping out of her underclothes.

Kirin takes a bite of his apple and smirks, obvious in his slow dragging look over her body. His eyes catch at the various patterns of bruises, at the scrapes on her knees, the bloodfly sting over her hip that is an angry red and black-blue splotch still more than a week after. His eyes narrow, appraising rather than lecherous. She is not a soft woman. There is not an ounce of extra on her anywhere.

She pulls the few pins out that keep her hair out and sets them down on the table, inches away from the bowl of fruit.

“It has been five years,” she notes. She combs her fingers through her hair to encourage the rest of it to unwind. She unwinds the wrap on her hand and he tracks that too, eager for a sight of the back of her left hand.

He is not disappointed, she hopes wryly. The Mark does not flare; she has no inclination towards showmanship in the moment. It says enough on its own, black against her pale skin. Her signet ring rests above it. The contrast is remarkable.

“Have you seen my aunt’s?” she asks, in the name of conversation, and turns her back on him. She has the Mark. She doesn’t fear him.

His admission only comes after he pushes his chair back. She hears the sound of Jindosh pouring something right about the same time that she turns the tap on.

“I have never seen her without her gloves,” he says, and the chair scrapes against the floor as he settles back down. While the water runs, Emily pilfers his cabinets. She rejects the bath salts, she’s had her fill from the ocean, but she does help herself to his soaps, setting them within reach of the tub. The basin isn’t full yet, but she’s not in a position to mind, easing herself in despite the sharp burn of the water. Her head lolls back against the rim of the tub, and she looks back to Jindosh.

Emily is struck with the sudden urge to ask after her. She knows nothing about Delilah, nothing beyond what Delilah and the Outsider have told her. And she has no one to ask. Her grandfather is dead, Corvo’s indisposed, and her mother is long gone. The Heart, as always, proves enigmatic.

No, she thinks. No room for sentiment. Delilah had none for her.

Jindosh drinks his brandy and sits loose-limbed in his chair. She lets the water reach her neck before she leans forward and turns the tap off. Her skin will be an angry red once she leaves the tub, but the feeling of being clean will be worth it.   
  
Emily submerges her head to get her hair wet. She scrubs at her arms, her legs, the curve of her neck. She doesn’t look behind herself again before she speaks.

“Come here,” she says. The play between them is not so much a game as a dance, and— it has been five years. The idea of mock violence does not appeal to her as much as it once did. Not with him, not when they had been at one another’s throats not a week ago.

He rises, and obeys. Jindosh holds his drink loosely in his right hand, looking down at her in the tub. Her chest against her knees, she rubs the soap into the sponge she’s been using. She offers it to him, and he takes it, disbelieving.

“Help me with my back?”

He exhales, eyes pinched closed. His glass is set down on the floor, and he kneels slowly beside the tub. Without complaint, he takes the sponge and draws it along her back in slow circles. Her eyes have relaxed closed within the first few swipes.

“You don’t need to be so careful,” she mumbles, mouth against her knees. Her back has as many bruises as her front. It’s not that she’s clumsy; Corvo taught her how to fall. But her Mark is not perfect. She has judged her jumps and leaps well enough, but if she’s off by an inch or more, she lands roughly. More often when she fears discovery, or has a narrow gap before the guard patrol returns—

She’s very lucky she hasn’t broken bones.

He hesitates only over the bloodfly sting. His fingers prod at it clinically, harsh only in the attentive way of doctors.

“How old is this? A month, by the looks of it.”

“A week,” she says, muffled. She can imagine the puzzled look on his face, and draws her Marked hand along in the water by way of explanation.

“How interesting,” he notes, and goes back to helping her wash. His hand is much more gentle when he combs the hair off her neck and back, dipping the sponge in the water and squeezing it above, letting it wash away the suds. She sees him grip the sides of the tub and lean in before his lips press to the back of her neck and work their way down the knobs of her spine.

It is not difficult to imagine him mentally naming the vertebrae.

“Jindosh,” she says, and he stops, moving away as easily as he’d leaned in. “Would you bring me a towel?”

Back under the water once he steps away, running her fingers through her hair to rinse out the soap. She breaks the water to him standing beside the tub with the towel spread in his arms; she takes it and wraps it about herself before she pulls the plug and lets the water drain.

She holds the towel as she gathers her clothes into her arms. There will be wet footprints on the floor no matter what she does, despite drying her feet on the mat, but she is economical in her steps and he does not say anything. He only watches, even as she slings her grenade belt over her shoulder and holds her sword with the same hand keeping the towel in place.

Jindosh takes hold of the lever and the bathroom turns twice, once to a room she has not seen before, and then to the one with a balcony where she arrived. He steps off the platform and she follows, and he uses the stationary lever to change the rooms again, to bring the section with the bed turning towards them.

Emily makes use of a table to set her clothes back down, laying out her outfit, her weapons. She smooths her hands down along the front of her jacket, feeling the fabric catch at the edges of her calluses.

Unease rises in her stomach and she leaves it be. Jindosh has sat down on the edge of the bed and is untying his cravat, shoes neatly lined up by the dresser. She unwinds her towel and tosses it over the back of a chair before going to aid him, her fingers slimmer than his. Her eyes are drawn to the prosthetic again.

“How did you do that? Blow them off?” she says, conversational, straddling his knees for easiest access. The silk knot falls apart under her hands, and she tugs it off the rest of the way, tossing it over the side of the bed.

“They were cut off. A Clockwork prototype,” Jindosh admits, looking up at her face. He rests his left hand on her waist, and she can feel the prosthetic fingers, cold and porcelain in comparison to the rest of his hand. “Were it not for quick thinking, I would have lost the whole hand.”

“You would have found a way around it, I’m sure. Lean forward.”

He does, and she eases his jacket off his shoulders. Jindosh nips at the curve of her breast while so close, his hand rising off her waist as he draws it out of the sleeve. Mouth against her skin, he murmurs, “I would have. Doing without would have been troublesome while I built a replacement.”

She slides her fingers between the curve of his neck and his high collar, her other hand picking at the buttons. He looks up at her, and she drags her fingers from his buttons to press against his sternum.

“Lean back. Against the mattress.”

He obeys, falling back She straddles his waist rather than just a knee.

Jindosh doesn’t have the right sort of face to look debauchable. He’d have to look innocent first to be capable of being ruined. His cheekbones are far too sharp and his nose and lips too thin. He does manage to look like a challenge, laying below her.

Wanting to take him apart has unfortunate associations when she’s fairly sure she saw a corpse in the midst of dissection on lower level of his laboratory.

Emily is methodical as she unbuttons his shirt, working her way down. His hands return to her waist and she kisses him again, tongue dipping into his mouth and his breath coming out his nose harshly. His back bows as he tries to press closer to her, his heels sinking into the mattress for leverage.

His hand traces from her waist along to her hip, following the jut down to her cunt. She would not label him cautious, and he’s moved far from the reverence he used during the Feast, but the way he accustoms himself to her body is slow and methodical.

Experimental.

And it’s the damned prosthetic that he slides into her, a porcelain thumb that he angles against her clit. It’s not cold anymore.

“Another,” she says. Emily’s long outgrown demure. Jindosh obliges, watching her face. “Curl your fingers, just— like _that_. Good.”

She braces her hands on his shoulders, grips them tightly. Rolls of her hips drive her down on his hand, the counterpoint of his thumb providing just enough friction and pressure that she can slide into a rhythm that calls color in her cheeks. He looks at her the same way he looked at the part he’d been working with when she’d stepped into his office, brows furrowed and lips tight. The effect is ruined by the spit gloss on his lips, the way his throat works when he swallows, his own state of undress.

The picture works for her as well as the alien feel of his fingers in her, flesh and blood next to mechanical, and her thighs start to quiver. Nearly, not quite, heat in her cunt and deep throbs of pleasure below her stomach. Jinosh rises, shifts his arm as she does so, and she lets out an animal noise of annoyance. His free hand hovers over the small of her back, barely touching, and he sets his mouth to her neck, biting and kissing along her throat, moaning at the taste of her skin.

“Nearly there, Emily,” he purrs, confident enough to be infuriating. Jindosh’s tone is altogether too much like the way he’d spoken over the speakers. He’s unbearably cocky, and her fingers dig into his shoulders with the intentions of leaving gouges from her nails. She hates him more than anything else in that moment.

“I had missed this,” he admits. “The thought of bedding you, of hearing you whimper. The Empress of the Isles, rutting on my hand. _I_ had seen something no one else had.”

She is unbearably near coming, her face hot, her cunt tight around his fingers, and if she were closer to his throat she’d have torn it out. Her Mark echos with the promise of being able to do just that, to turn into shade and ash and shove her hand down his throat to stop him talking. It’s wonderful.

“If only you’d come to Karnaca,” he muses. “Or perhaps if I had thrown myself at your feet in the Tower.”

Jindosh hums a noise of consideration, and then shifts his hand. Those long fingers twitch deeper, and Emily snarls, one of her hands clawing through his hair and yanking. He bites hard into her neck, and Emily doesn’t muffle a scream as she comes, the tension snapping and pleasure rolling through her in waves that leave her thighs numb and her muscles slack.

He allows her half a minute perhaps a full one where she holds tight to him and breathes like a woman saved from drowning. Then, Jindosh falls back against the bed and untangles her, turning her onto her back. Loose-limbed, she allows herself to be splayed, for him to open her legs. He stands off the bed, panting, undoing his trousers with fumbling hands. He cannot stop looking back at her every few seconds, as if to check she’s still there.

His pants down around his hips, he takes his cock in hand and wastes no time in thrusting into her. Seated, he holds her hips. His hair is in disarray, strands freed from his neat slicked back hair and pressed to his forehead with sweat.

“Look at me,” he hisses. “Look at me.”

She does, holding his eyes steadily. Emily is in the sweet haze of post-orgasm, but even languid she has a set to her chin and a piercing stare.

He is transfixed, lured closer, hunched over her body. Jindosh plants a hand flat against the bed over her shoulder and curls the other one around her thigh, hefting one of her thighs up to allow him just that closer, just that deeper.

“Say my name,” he says. He starts to fuck her in earnest, an unsteady rhythm as he finds the best tempo, the best way to hold her the way he likes while being a man unused to heavy work.

“Jindo—”

He cuts her off, bitter, shaking his head. “No! No—”

“ _Kirin_ ,” she wagers, and he nods, rolling his hips, finding himself. It comes easily then, better now that he’s explored her with his fingers. His teeth are grit and his eyes pinched shut, but he drives himself into her unerringly. He’s chasing something, and she delights in seeing the ecstasy roll across his face in waves. Resting his head on her sternum, he pants erratically against her skin. His hand falters where it digs into her thigh, and she locks her legs around his waist to save him the trouble.

Perhaps half a dozen thrusts later, he comes inside her with a muffled groan against her skin. He falters-- slumps against her, most of his weight one her chest but not bothersome enough to justify shoving him away. She can see the ribs along the line of his spine. Wiry is the first word that comes to mind.

She is unsure of what to do with him. Emily’s hand hovers over his head before settling to pet his hair in short stokes. Jindosh, even in the throes of exhaustion, stiffens at first. His relaxation has to be coaxed out of him. A few minutes of that same repetitive touch and he relents, the resistance leeching out of him as he loses the tightness in his limbs.

Karnaca’s heat is too much for them to stay like this. He rises on his elbows and rolls off her. She thinks she dozes, closing her eyes briefly and opening them to a clock chiming in the hallway. Jindosh is still beside her.

“Aramis Stilton,” he says, suddenly. Emily rolls to her side to look at him. “You should look to Silton.”

He swallows thickly. His tongue wets his lips, kiss-swollen, and he prefers looking up at the ceiling to looking her way. “There was a... party at his mansion three years ago.”

He’s dancing around saying more, and yet she doesn’t want to press him further.

“I’ll look into it,” she says, uneasy, and sits up. His hand snaps out and closes around her wrist.

Emily looks over her shoulder at him. Jindosh opens his mouth, then snaps it closed. His fingers loosen, and she slips out of his grasp and to the chair where she’d piled her clothes.

She dresses quickly, glad to pull her mask up over her mouth and nose. Her hair is still damp as she twists it up. Jindosh is looking away rather than at her as she goes; she calls out to catch his attention before she makes for the balcony to leave the way she came.

“I’ll see myself out,” she says, and reaches for the platform below.

She does not land smoothly this time, following instinct and dropping into a roll rather than risk stumbling forward and twisting her ankle. She climbs back to the roof as quickly as possible, making her way across and to the carriage. The feeling only subsides once she’s making her way back down to Meagan’s skiff, and she swallows the rest before she greets the Wale’s captain.


	5. IV: Silton Manor, Karnaca, 18--

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So! We begin winding up. The last three chapters are in the editing process, which is why this took so long, and I aim to have one out a week until we finish. As always, I love nothing more than your comments. I'm very pleased with where this is going and where it's been, and it never would have been more than a oneshot if not for y'all.

Meagan had reacted well to her wanting to check in on Stilton, happy to share the intelligence she and Sokolov had gathered that did seem to point towards him being their next logical step. Gentle prodding coaxed out the truth of her arm and eye. Though she couldn’t forget that it was Sokolov, with a well-timed throat clearing, getting Meagan to confess to Emily the specifics of her attempted rescue and intelligence gathering foray into Silton’s house three years ago.  
  
After that, it had only been a matter of replenishing her supplies and getting a good night’s sleep before the mission. Hypatia had decided to return to Addermire, hoping her reputation would shield her once the Duke caught wind of her return. Emily had been reluctant to see her go, her concerns twofold: her reputation not being enough to throw back the Duke, and a potential reemergence of Grim Alex. But Hypatia had made her choice and left, though not without leaving a large selection of Addermire Solutions behind.  
  
The Dust District was… dusty. Finding Corvo’s old home was a shock to her, and she had tucked the Blade Verbena trophy away on her belt, and poured over her grandmother’s diary with an ache in her heart. Watching out for Overseers and Howlers hadn’t been as much of a concern—she knew about the lock on the door, Jindosh’s lock—and if she needed to deal with either of them or both, she’d do it after she had found Stilton.  
  
And then everything had gone to shit.  
  
Not that this all isn’t terrifyingly thrilling, in its own way. She holds the Timepiece with a reverence she didn’t give the bonecharms bound to the inside of her coat, though she was not nearly as tender as she was with the Heart.  
  
In the present, she picked her way through the house, looting what she could and shooting down bloodfly nests with Stilton in mind. She pitied him. He seemed—he was, by all accounts—a kind person, if fundamentally broken. Meagan cared for him. She had lost her eye and arm to try and find him, to do what Emily was now doing.  
  
Emily settled behind a screen in the massive pool room, and flicked the timepiece open. The lenses glittered like bloodfly wings, and she took a sweep of the room to make sure she’d be hidden once she was in the past, and triggered the device. The room shivered before her, and fell into repair.  
  
“—he’s on the balcony, smoking. He’s not right,” a woman frets off to her side.  
  
“Then stay away from him,” a man’s voice answers. “He’ll join the others in the study soon enough. You’ve got duties to keep you distracted until then; clean the balcony once he leaves.”  
  
The woman—and Emily risks a peek out from between the panels of the screen to confirm that she’s a maid—sets to work on changing out the towels in the room and checks the vials of bath salts. She doesn’t realize she’s not alone until Emily has her in a chokehold.  
  
Her shoes batter the tile floors, but eventually she collapses in Emily’s arms, and is dragged behind the screen and tucked neatly into a corner.  
  
She is curious, though, about the man on the balcony. There was Breanna Ashworth, mentioned by the guard downstairs. Stilton, the Duke. Grim Alex. The names echo her progression through Karnaca, and Emily dreads looking onto the balcony with a sick sort of anticipation.  
  
They keep meeting.  
  
Perhaps she should have asked the Outsider if this was his fault, some facet of the labyrinth he was guiding her through. She would have accused him of stacking the deck for his favorites, though she couldn’t say she didn’t appreciate it, if only—well, less of Jindosh would have been nice.  
  
Unless.  
  
She skitters around the edge of the room and longs for the power than would have allowed her to do so as a beast of smoke and ash, slipping into the hallway. There’s the balcony door, and if she peers through it, she’ll see whoever the maid was talking about.  
  
He’s got his elbows resting on the railing, leaning out and gazing down into the gardens below. She knows Stilton is in his gazebo. He has the notebook she needs, and she will go get it, after Jindosh leaves to join his comrades. She cannot risk being spotted, being captured, least of all by any of them, because—  
  
What will the Outsider allow her to change? Will someone spotting her now really matter? Surely it would have been mentioned to her by now if she was suddenly thousands of leagues away from where she ought to have been, even if it was three years ago.  
  
She opens the door, and walks through it.  
  
Jindosh turns, and meets her eyes. He looks curious, squinting at her for a beat, as if she’s a shadow and blinking a few times will resolve the image before him. Outsider’s teeth, she thinks, and then reaches up to tug her mask down, the door closing behind her.  
  
“Hello, Kirin,” she says. “You haven’t changed a bit.”  
  
He looks shocked now, and more than a little terrified. His eyes dart to the door behind her, and his back presses against the rail. She presses her advantage, running on intuition and bravery.  
  
“You think I wouldn’t recognize you?” Emily says, stepping forward. “I’m almost offended. My aunt? Really?”  
  
He won’t ever have this look on his face again, she supposes, gape-mouthed like a dying fish, opening and closing. His teeth click shut, and he bares them in a snarl. It fades once she presses her hand to his chest. His hand jerks up. Prosthetic, she notes. He’s already hard at work on his Clockworks.  
  
“You can relax. I’m not here to kill you,” Emily assures him. She’s stuck in this now, and going to follow it to the end. How nice, to have a measure on his reactions this time around. To have the upper hand. “I only wanted to talk. It’s been long overdue. You were very hard to find.”  
  
She hasn’t forgotten their conversation in his mansion.  
  
“I saw you. Three weeks later, when I gave a speech. You were in the crowd, but left before I could reach you.”  
  
He sneers. “I did not think you the sentimental type-”  
  
“You’ve been very busy.” She cuts him off. She ought to have paid better attention to the papers, she ought to have done so much differently when she was in Dunwall, but she can’t hate her stupidity and keep a clear head. She moves on.  
  
“Abele is a generous patron, I’ll give you that. But why didn’t you come to me first?”  
  
She’s pressed him to the rail. There’s a breath between them, but he reacts to her presence like she’s right up against his body. Jindosh isn’t leaning far enough off the rail to risk falling, but his spine is bowed.  
  
When he goes for his pistol, he’s fast about drawing it. Emily’s hand closes around his wrist before the muzzle points at anything other than the floor. He struggles, fighting her, and then she is pressed against him, wrestling it out of his grip and tossing it to the floor. It slides along the tile, and the loud sound it makes when it hits the floor has her jerking her head to stare through the wall at where she knows the nearest guard lurks, staring through it, calling on the Mark. She forgot the Outsider’s earlier warning in the heat of the moment, and her vision does not light up. Jindosh snarls, trying to take advantage of her momentary lapse by bringing his knee up and his boot onto her thigh, kicking out. Locked against him, determined not to loosen her hold on his wrists, she stumbles back, cursing under her breath, yanking him with her. He opens his mouth to yell for the guards, and she grabs her sword instead, relinquishing her grip on one of his wrists, the blade folding out and pressed against the angle of his jaw before he finishes drawing breath enough to do so.  
  
His heel would raise a bruise on her thigh, and it hurts like nothing else right now. It’s going to make climbing a pain, and she won’t be able to sprint without being reminding of it.  
  
“Don’t,” Emily snarls. Her sword hand does not shake. Jindosh swallows. His resistance proved futile—she doubts he’ll try again. He’ll at least listen now.  
  
“You intend to revive my aunt, alongside the rest of her loyal supporters. But you’re not a zealot like the rest of them. You want power, and you think she can give it to you,” Emily says, tracking him carefully. Jindosh is still breathing quickly, but the tension in his limbs isn’t wound tight for any particular purpose, just in anticipation of the sword at his throat moving.  
  
“She’ll toss you aside for that. Because you don’t love her, because you don’t worship her—Delilah knows the score.”  
  
“And I suppose,” Jindosh quips. “That you are the alternative option?”  
  
“I am,” Emily agrees. “I am your only option to get out of this, Jindosh. I know about her coup. She won’t win. Spy for me, and after she’s ousted, you’ll be rewarded.”  
  
Jindosh smirks, sly. “Why wait? We’ve yet to even bring her back—I admit I had my doubts, Empress, but you’ve so cleanly dismissed them. Why not stop the séance before it even starts? You certainly have the talents for it.”  
  
He glances down, at the part of the sword he can see, then back to her.  
  
The air smells like salt water. Like seaweed left out to dry, like fresh fish in your mouth, flaky and moist. A chill sweeps over them both, and the air stills. Both of them know where to look before he appears, stripping their surrounding of color, leeching them of life.  
  
“Kirin Jindosh,” the Outsider says. “She offers you a gift, tied tight with the promise of an Empress. It is not an offer most men are given twice in their life, but she is the better choice of the two. Your death finds you later when you are at her side.”  
  
The Void leaking in hisses and cracks, and Jindosh watches the Outsider like he looked at the part he was working on in his lab, like he was trying to find ways to crack it open. Emily withdrew her sword from his neck, and stepped back.  
  
“I thought _you_ didn’t interfere,” she said. As if her Mark wasn’t him reaching his hand into the world, stirring it up. A surgeon, removing a cancerous growth, and she the scalpel that would be used to cut Delilah out of him.  
  
The Outsider looks at her, and smiles. The black emptiness of his eyes reflects her own face back at her. He raises his hands, palms up at his sides in a benediction.  
  
“Sokolov will be so disappointed to find himself a hair’s breath away from being interesting enough, over yet another he rejected for being not brilliant, inadequate.”  
  
_Liar_ , Emily thinks, but holds her tongue. His true motivations are as inscrutable as always.  
  
The Outsider speaks to Jindosh alone again, arms folding over his chest. Jindosh is enthralled, caught between movements.  
  
“Delilah rips a hole in the Void tonight. A pinprick, through which chaos flows and disrupts the natural order. Dear Emily has been sent sideways in time to witness it,” the Outsider states, monotone and echoing. “In her time, the two of you have become something to watch. I saw you when you were but a child, Kirin, brilliance born into a family which could never understand you. You stand alone, without peers, without allies, and clawed yourself up from the dirt with intellect alone. For how long did you survive without a patron? What did you do for coin enough for copper wire? How did you get that interview with Sokolov, the apprenticeship that should have laid all of the Isles at your feet?”  
  
The Outsider smiles. “But it did not. Everything turned to dust. You lay at a crossroads, Kirin. There are many different paths before you. Beware false idols.”  
  
Emily’s parsing out another question as he dissipates into ash and shards of obsidian, blowing away in a wind they cannot see.  
  
“I thought it only Overseer propaganda,” Jindosh says, looking at where the Outsider had been. “Meant to fill the minds of idiots and children with fear.”  
  
“And the ritual tonight? My aunt’s powers?”  
  
He half-turns to look at her. “The Void is real enough. But to know it has a master…”  
  
Jindosh trails off. The fire in him is banked, and the cogs of his mind are turning.  
  
Emily focuses on the gazebo, taking her crossbow off her belt and loading it with sleep darts, debating between simply shooting Stilton from a distance, or working her way around the guards and choking him out. The Outsider does not stun her anymore. She has things to do.  
  
Jindosh says, “What are you doing?” and Emily lowers the crossbow, judging the distance to be too great to risk.  
  
“Deciding,” she says, and then removes her belt, the heavy grenades and the crossbow, her springrazors and the rest, and sets them down on the balcony. Her thigh is still sore, she can’t risk any extra weight. Her pistol, too, which she puts down with a meaningful glance before mounting the railing.  
  
“Stay put,” she instructs.  
  
Emily favor the scaffolding that hugs the sides of Stilton’s back yard, dropping down on the first guard and knocking them unconscious. The rest are treated to the same fate, choked before they realize she’s there, then dragged into the bushes or behind a convenient topiary. Jindosh is treated to the whole show, and perhaps Emily does show off, knowing she’s being watched, clever tricks employed as she goes about her work.  
  
She climbs the gazebo from the back, perched on the rail before she eases down and behind Stilton; he receives the same treatment as his staff, but she takes care to gently place him in a chair rather than on the cold ground.  
  
The moment his mind blanks she feels—something. A shifting, a breeze through her ribs, just the same as the one that had ghosted through her when Kirin had turned to see her. She takes out the Timepiece and unfolds it, looking at the backyard.

It is unchanged. That is that there is nothing abnormal about it. The hedges are trimmed, the pathways clean. It is maintained as well as is it now—and she half-turns, spanning the lens across the whole of the backyard and the house too.

Everything is pristine. The ruin that once consumed the ground and estate is gone. There are even wolfholds—guards—patrolling.

‘Outsider’s—’ she thinks, and a cool breeze sweeps through the backyard. Emily reconsiders—the piano and the balcony being ample example of the Outsider's ability to just drop in here **—** folding the Timepiece back up and tucking it back in her coat to retract her steps and return to Kirin, who stands sentinel where she left him, arms folded.

“Impressed?” she quips. Her thigh twinges with pain to remind her.

“You are remarkably efficient,” he replies, sinking down on his knees and reaching over to pull her grenade belt and all the rest over. Mute, he holds it, one end in each hand, and she steps over to allow him to fasten it about her waist, his meticulous fingers putting it into place and tightening the buckles and straps.

He tucks her pistol into the holster, and then her crossbow, on bended knee—

“When I see you next, I will have improvements ready for this. It’s one of Joplin’s designs. He lacked a certain—elegance.”

She takes it, secures it.

“Three years and change,” Emily gives him. She doesn't need to over-examine why the appearance of the Outsider changed his opinion so easily. Murmured intimate truths and a prophesy will do that to a man, though she does spare some thought for her own role in his life. 

His eyes glitter in the low light before he casts them aside and stands. “I am inclined to keep my neck off the chopping block, Lady Kaldwin, but the stories I was told as a brat about the Outsider always said he was a trickster. Do not let me regret this.”

“I won’t know,” she says. “I won’t remember, not until I… come back here.”

“Until you complete the loop,” he says. “Time is a strange thing, and stranger still to know it can be played with.” A dreamy smile curls his lips. “What mysteries.”

“In two years, find Meagan Foster. She’s the one that will bring me here.” Jindosh pulls himself back to focus, and is intent again. Emily continues. “I made a bargain for your help in the—before. I promised you a pardon. To be your patron. To negotiate with the Academy on your behalf. I’ll keep my word.”

His brows raise, and he gives her a little nod.

“You still did it, even if you won’t remember,” she argues, though to whom she’s not sure.

The Outsider wanted this, over any other outcome. For them to come to an agreement. For Jindosh to have this knowledge going into the séance. The séance which he needs to leave for, soon, lest he be even later than Stilton was going to be before she’d rendered him unconscious.

Jindosh steps forward, and leans his head to kiss her, his lips dry against the corner of her mouth. He does not presume, does not touch her any more than his mouth brushing hers briefly before pulling back, and checking the fold of his cuffs.

“To—tide you over?” Emily forces out, disconcerted. She had half-expected to need to wrangle him, to coax him in the way she’s come to associate with persuading him, promises of violence or sex or violent sex.

“Three years is not so long,” Jindosh says. “And will feel shorter, I think, for you.”  
  
Emily holds her tongue, and notices she’s shifted her weight to her back foot, as if to take a further step back and away from him. He wants to unnerve her more than he wants to bed her, she realizes. It’s worth the wait for him, to have that win and that win alone now.

“I need to see what happens,” she says, watching him a bit more critically than before. “Go. They can’t start until you arrive.”

Jindosh smiles, or an approximation of one, the corners of his mouth turned up.

“As my Empress commands,” he says, and turns to walk to the main doors back into the mansion. Emily lingers behind, dropping back into a crouch and watching him through the keyhole. His voice is muffled, but he walks past the guard—says something to him that makes the other man turnabout face and walk away, then to the next ones, conspiring before the locked door to the study. They startle, then head the same way their superior did.

He’s clearing a path for her.

She waits until he’s knocked on the door, received, and the door relocked before she enters again, low despite the apparent lack of guards. The door unlocks for her once she’s input the correct key. Taking hold of the handle to open it causes the same rise of nausea in her throat as seeing Jindosh, as knocking Silton unconscious, but she turns it anyway, and steps inside to witness the resurrection of her aunt.


	6. V: Dreadful Wale, Karnaca 1852

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Guess who sucks! It's me, I suck. In apology, nearly 8k of a whopper of a chapter. The fic is finished and just in the process of editing. We're nearly there, y'all.

She tumbles out the doors from Stilton’s estate, landing heavily on her hands and knees. She tastes ash in her mouth, and her heart is drumming a call to arms in her chest. When she was falling, the fear that had lit in her was beyond description. Now, on the ground, her body has not quite caught up to the fact that the danger has wholly passed.

It is not until she rises to her feet that she realizes that the changes she had noticed in Stilton’s estate were not restricted just _to_  the estate. Where before she had been looking out on boarded-up windows and the bodies of Overseers and Howlers both, crucified along the borders of their territories, she is now gazing on the cleanest and brightest district she’d seen in the whole of Karnaca, including the wealthiest parts.

A sweep of nausea has her crumbling against one of the walls for support, and she swallows a few breaths before she manages to look back up. The streets are mostly clear, apart from one or two pedestrians milling about. Her Mark still aches, her whole left hand numb with it, so she can’t risk reaching. The journey back to the house where Meagan had left her is accomplished solely by mundane means.

With the pounding headache and the occasional bouts of her stomach revolting, she makes it to the building and slips inside. The door closes and she tumbles forward, and Emily is surprised to find the office occupied by not just Meagan, but also by a woman behind a desk who looks terribly unimpressed to find her on all fours on the floor.

“Well,” a voice says— the woman from the station before Addermire, Emily recalls, scrambling for a name. “She doesn’t look like much, Meagan.”

Bleary, Emily raises her head and stares at Lucia Pastor, head of the Miner’s Family Association. Meagan, leaning against the desk, pushes back from it and walks forward, arms folded, nearly concerned.

“What in the Void happened to you in there, Emily?”

She rises to her feet shakily, and tugs down her mask. She looks at Meagan to respond, and freezes.

Meagan is—whole. Uninjured. She stares at Emily with two eyes and looks cross. There’s no longer a pinned-up sleeve where an arm should be.

“I’m—” she rasps, and shakes her head, then looks at Lucia, trying to buy time. “May I have something to drink?”

Lucia sighs, pushes back from her desk, and leaves the room shaking her head. 

Meagan squints at her, hands on her hips, looking her over to check for injuries. Emily summons strength, and tugs her mask down from around her mouth once Lucia returns with a bottle of pear soda. It’s blessedly cool, and Emily drinks half of it in a few swallows.

“Thank you,” she tells Lucia, starting to feel grounded. The sweetness washes out some of the awful taste in her mouth.

“I’m fine," she says. "So is Stilton.”

“Good,” Meagan says, satisfied, and then focuses on Lucia. “She’s the real deal, Lucia. I wouldn’t fuck with you. You should have seen her at Addermire. She cleared those witches out with no trouble. Delilah won’t run things like Stilton does. She’s more of their same— or worse.”

_There were no witches at Addermire_ , Emily thinks dumbly. Meagan’s arm, her eye, this district. None of this is right— it’s better, objectively, she knows that from what little she’s seen, but it’s not _right_.

Lucia holds her rigid posture for a moment more before relenting, shaking her head and walking back to her desk, dropping into her chair. “I’ll see what I can do.”

“Thanks,” Meagan says, and then motions to Emily. “We’ll leave out the back, Lucia. No reason to draw attention to you.”

Lucia only sighs and waves them off. Emily tags behind Meagan mutely.

They reach the moored skiff after a rather eventless trek through the undercity. Meagan slides in and beckons her over. Emily moves slowly, her limbs stiff, cold fear settled into the tips of her fingers and the pit of her stomach.

“You alright?” Meagan asks, steering the skiff effortlessly, one hand on the tiller and the other resting in her lap.

“Yes,” Emily says.

“I’m glad Stilton’s alright,” Meagan says. “Thanks for checking on him, Emily.”

“You’re welcome,” she says, her mouth stuffed with cotton.

“The Duke should back off insisting that he ‘needs protection’ now. I think he’s getting suspicious of Stilton’s visits to the Wale. It’s fine. Lucia can ferry messages back and forth,” Megan carries on, bringing them into open water. “Are you sure you’re alright?”

Meagan looks at her, staring with concern that twists her mouth into a frown. Like she isn’t—like she doesn’t know. She’s whole again, and Meagan doesn’t know that it’s abnormal for her to have two hands and two eyes.

Emily’s glad she saved Stilton from madness, but Meagan also seems different beyond just the physical. That undercurrent of feral bitterness has been wiped away. Somehow, Meagan is chatty. Still Meagan, but chatty.

They get out to open water, and Emily immediately grabs for the rail, vomiting over the side. Meagan curses and cuts the engine, leaning over toward Emily, placing a hand on her back.

“Shit. I knew something wasn’t right as soon as you came out of there. What happened?”

Weakly, Emily lifts her Marked hand, and then wretches again. The pear soda is tacky and saccharine in her mouth, but she’s sure her stomach is empty now. Blaming the Outsider is the easiest way out of this, and also mostly true, and because the alternative conversation is not one she plans on having with Meagan.

Meagan hisses out a breath and goes back to her seat. Emily rises slowly and wipes her mouth with the back of her hand. When Meagan starts the engine back up, she keeps it low, driving the skiff slowly through the bay.

“Did he—” she starts, and fails to finish, trailing off rather than mention the Outsider.

“He was being dramatic,” Emily fills in. “To make a point. I... fell, in the Void.”

Which is probably half of the explanation for her unwellness, with the other half the fact that she apparently rewrote history. The worst part is that she can’t just ask what’s different. Too much can’t have changed. All she did was keep one of Karnaca’s wealthiest men sane and  _also_ attempt to seduce Kirin Jindosh into being slightly more manageable the next time she ran into him.

Her stupidity does not escape her. It was enough that the Outsider saw fit to step in, and stack the deck. Even worse, Jindosh has been given three years to run amuck with divination guiding his hand.

“I’ll make you some ginger tea once we get back on the Wale,” Meagan says. “Don’t let Sokolov or Jindosh know you’re not feeling well, or they’ll try to test something stronger on you.”

And there it is.

“Who else is still there?” Emily asks, trying to grasp the situation and measure the damage. She better know who to expect on the Wale before she has to see them.

“Hypatia left this morning, after I dropped you off,” Meagan supplies. “Byrne will be coming on in the morning. He has someone he wants you to meet. One of the Sisters who escaped Delilah’s little puppet show.”

“Good,” she says, for lack of anything better. “I’ll be glad to speak with her.”

Meagan lets her use the rest of the ride to gather herself, which she does by taking big breaths of ocean air and staring into the wind until her eyes water from it. Meagan even offers her a hand as she winches the boat up level to the dock, but Meagan waves it off.

The sound of bickering reaches them once they open the door to go below deck. Through the metal body of the ship, she can only pick out tone rather than words. Sokolov will rumble something, and then Jindosh will snipe back, and Meagan’s face twists unpleasantly once she recognizes the pattern. She slams the cabin door once Emily’s inside, and the voices stop abruptly.

“Come on,” Meagan says, turning down the stairs, looking up and back at Emily when she realizes Emily isn’t following. “ _I_ _’m_  the damned captain. It’s _my_  ship.”

Megan is speaking, very clearly, just to herself, and Emily mutely pads along at her heels.

The Dreadful Wale looks mostly the same. The chalkboard is where she remembers it, and all the scattered tools on the worktable across from it are similar, if piled slightly higher and clearly segregated into two piles. Sokolov is painting- or was painting, and is now just caught mid-gesticulation with his brush in the air. He looks healthy. His face doesn’t have that awful jaundiced look to it. There are no visible bruises on his skin. Jindosh has his hand flat against the blackboard, turning at the waist to see them coming down the stairs. His cheeks have high color in them, and the chalkboard has been flipped to the other side and covered with formulas and diagrams, some scrawled in his hand over ones that look like Sokolov’s.

They look guiltily frozen, but they lurch to life once both women arrive.

“Meagan, welcome back!” Sokolov says, rising from his chair and setting palate and brush both down. His veneer of innocence does nothing to cool Meagan’s ire, who stalks towards him and shoulders Jindosh out of the way- he sputters, but backs up- to turn the blackboard back to its rightful side where Meagan has laid out Emily's path through the city. A flurry of papers has tumbled from it, and Sokolov glances from them to Meagan. Pacification clearly failing, he changes his approach.

“We were simply discussing the merits of—”

“—this ends with the engine dissembled for ‘repairs’, Anton, I don’t want excuses—”

Jindosh, meanwhile, is inching back, putting distance between himself and Meagan while Meagan's back is toward him. He makes it nearly to the stairwell before he deems himself safe, and only then does he look at Emily, meeting her eyes with an air of knowing before settling against the door.

“I assume it went well,” he says.

“It did,” Emily says, and watches Sokolov attempt to pacify Meagan by lowering himself to his knees and begin to pick up all the scattered newspaper clippings, notes, and pictures that made up their strategies. Emily leaves Jindosh behind to help poor Sokolov.

She makes it to having her hands on the floor before nausea crashes into her and she’s scrambling for the trash can, dry-heaving over turpentine rags, that morning’s newspaper, and plantain peels. Those does nothing to help with her stomach or her light-headedness, and when strong hands help her to her feet, she offers no fight.

“What happened?” Sokolov says, and she realizes she’s leaning on him, and his hands are gripping her arms.

“I’m fine,” she emphasizes, and Meagan guides her away from the scattering of clippings. 

“I’ll make you that tea. You two," and she points at them, "can clean this up.” The two of them accept their punishment meekly, moving to reassemble the board. Meagan more or less pulls her to her room, setting her down on the bed before leaving her be, closing the door behind her as she goes.

Emily splashes water on her face, gargles the taste of acid out of her mouth, glad for the sink and the mostly soundproof bunk. She strips down to her smalls and throws on a shirt and a spare pair of loose pants, not bothering to belt them or do up the shirt all the way. When Meagan returns it’s with the tea, only stopping in briefly to drop it off. Emily smiles and takes it, still perched on her cot. It’s only halfway through the cup that she looks around her room, and her eyes alight on her journal. She rises to pull it closer, and then retreats to the cot with it, flipping through it between swallows.

It’s invaluable. Emily pieces together what she can from the entries, and they are more than enough to stop her from feeling like she’s drowning.

She puts together the story of a very different coup. Where Delilah had come through Ramsey in the previous timeline, this time she hadn’t bothered with such small players. No— she had implemented her plan with the Oracular Order much sooner, and it had been the Sisters of the Abbey who had come to put Delilah on the throne, supported by the Duke. Corvo wasn’t trapped in stone, but instead leading a counterpoint resistance back in Dunwall. Alongside him were Yul Khulan and the Overseers who had witnessed the scene in the throne room where the coven-turned-Oracles had murdered most of the attendants of the memorial with living briars and dead hounds twined with roses. There are even a few smuggled letters pressed between the pages. Her father loves her, he’s proud of her, and he’ll have Dunwall ready for when she can return.

Hypatia had still been trapped at Addermire, though surrounded by witches, and witches wearing the bodies of Sisters. She had still gone to see Jindosh, and she can hear her own confusion at Jindosh’s actions, though she prides this past-her on at least recognizing him at the very least. Jindosh had played his part perfectly, sliding in at just the right time to offer his aid and Sokolov too, knowing quite well that their timelines wouldn’t match up, and her aloof was ‘has no idea he’s your mole and the reason this coup isn’t as awful as it could have been’.

But he’d taken—liberties, of a sort.

 

_12 th Day – Month of Harvest_

_Jindosh visited my room last night, after Meagan went abovedeck. I don’t know what she does up there, except that she doesn’t smoke, because otherwise Anton would join her._

_Jindosh knocked, and even though I was about to sleep, I let him in. He did this a few days ago, but we only spoke, mostly about the city itself. I had a great deal I wanted to ask him about—I think he’s like Corvo, in that luck and skill got him to where he is. He has such slim hands, and would have been a poor miner._

_He smokes. He lost fingers making his Clockwork Sentinels (the way he says it, it is very clear that they are Clockwork Sentinels, he may well have it patented) and his prosthetic doubles as a pipe. And he had white leaf tobacco._

_One thing led to another. Maybe I should feel guiltier than I do. He was much less pliable than he was during the Feast, though I assumed that-_

_He didn’t linger overlong. If he returns tomorrow or the next night, I’ll allow it._

Emily pours over the pages, noting differences and straightening her memories so she does not- cannot- make a mistake. Breanna is in Dunwall, alongside Delilah, but Meagan still took her to the Conservatory to see if they could undo the ritual-- they couldn’t. Stilton had been an ally from the start, and had put them in contact with Liam Byrne, an Overseer whom Stilton thought could be persuaded to turn the Overseers of Karnaca to Emily’s side. But like Meagan said on the skiff ride, she’s been concerned that the Duke was getting suspicious, and so sent Emily to check.

And Sokolov- well, he’d been ‘kidnapped’ again, stolen from the Wale by the Crown Killer, but surprised to see his former student was his jailer. While his confinement had been ... tense, it was in a warm, dry room with plenty of food and water, and no mention in her book of the electroshock chair. Jindosh, it seemed, had essentially volunteered herself once she’d snuck into his lab, presenting her with a wealth of information on Delilah and her plans.

The tea has been long abandoned by the time she finishes reading. Emily has no idea what to do with her feelings. Everything here and now is better than it was before. Everything is still on a knife’s edge, but maybe a duller knife.

She closes the journal when there’s a knock at her door, and pushes it to the side of her desk.

“Come in,” she says. Who should darken her doorway but Jindosh himself? He lets himself in like it’s routine, which the journal says it is, closes the door without a thump.

“You seem better,” he announces, his eyes picking over everything in the room. Her clothes, haphazardly strewn, do nothing for the general atmosphere, but everything else is tidy, especially her desk. The journal is closed.

“Three years to the day,” Jindosh says, and sits on a crate. “Shall we continue our conversation?”

He crosses one leg over the other, and leans forward, expectant, _smiling_.

“Anything I say pales in comparison to your fantasy,” Emily says. “You’ve had enough time to toy with it.”

Three years of motion, while she was standing still. To plan and to plot and to run simulations over and over in his head. He is the exact sort of man to have chosen his words and worked them over. She is lucky, she suspects, that he is not monologuing—

“I think not,” Jindosh says, and reaches into his jacket, pulling out a tin from his breast pocket. He uncrossing his legs, and sets the tin down on his knee. The hand with the prosthetic keeps it steady while his nimbler fingers spring the catch, revealing tobacco, a silvery, engraved tamper, and a tiny box of matches.

She waits, mouth a set line, until he says (nearly gently), “I was hoping for your assistance. You’ve given me a taste for the… dramatic.” 

He’s still infuriating, but in different ways. Still too unsure of their (newly) shared history to navigate this conversation comfortably, she comes to realize that she will never have those memories. That Emily is—gone. Forever, as easily as one of her doppelgängers.

That makes her deeply uneasy, but she slides forward on the bed and takes his left hand in her own. She’d never taken the time to look over the device before, and she hardly can play with it now, but she can feel the smoothness of the polished surface, and how the gears in the joints click smoothly into place when pressure is applied. She straightens out the thumb and pointer finger, easily feeling the thin seam and setting her nail to it, unsurprised but still pleased when it clicks open, spring loaded, revealing the bowl.

“Cigars would be easier,” she chides. Who normally does this for him? Before, a servant, mutely and with speed. Now? Perhaps her the past few times—it isn’t as if it differs much from a pipe. Only in the general size. She loads the bowl, tamps it, tops it off, lights a match—

“Inelegant,” he says. “Stains the fingers and the nails.”

“Or you were accused of putting on airs,” she mentions, waving the match to extinguish the flame, closing the little door back up and releasing his hand.

He clicks his tongue at her before bringing the prosthetic up to his mouth and taking a drag of the pipe, smoke billowing industriously from a hole cut into the side of a finger and wafting hazy through the thin air of the room.

She owes him nothing other than what he promised. Going above and beyond doesn’t put her in debt to him—and it isn’t as if he could have a finger in every pie. He cannot claim credit for or know every good turn he caused. Whatever boon he asks for—she’s keeping to the original deal.

“I never,” he says, “had a taste for whiskey.”

She tucks the tamper away in the box, and the matches too, snapping the whole thing closed. Emily leans off the bed and reaches back into his coat, feeling for the pocket with her fingertips and palming the box back in, sliding it snugly. He brings the pipe back to his mouth between them, another drag, and then his hand falling back down. Emily moves quickly, and she kisses him, mouth sealing over his and inhaling the smoke out of his mouth, the breath from his lungs—

The intimacy of it feels strange. His hand rests against her cheek, the porcelain warm from the smoldering tobacco inside it, and she has to rise off the bed to get closer, one dragging step giving her the reach to close her fingers in his high collar and keep him there as the smoke settles in her mouth and she has to break apart to breathe rather than cough in his face.

His eyes are watering when she pulls back—though not far enough that either of them would need to release the other, hands still like sprung traps, his against her cheek and hers in his collar.

Jindosh rises off his perch on the crate, and she takes a step back, and they move just like that, interlocked machinery, somehow coordinated enough that neither fumbles on their way to the bed, which she slides back on, and he ends up in her lap, more or less. His hand falls from her cheek, and his thumb brushes over her lower lip, flesh on flesh.

He kneels between her spread thighs on a mattress Emily hasn’t overly examined the origins of (just who was this little side room with a writing desk and shelves in mind for, anyway, with Sokolov already having his own space) and gets another mouthful of smoke from the pipe before kissing her, deep and permeating, until the poorly ventilated room is hazy and the tingling in her fingertips means she ought to take a few deep breaths of clear air. She takes the smoke that way—or he sets the porcelain thumb-cum-mouthpiece to her lips and lets her use him. His eyes smolder at that, and Emily isn’t the least surprised when their next kiss is cleaner, and he’s all but clamoring into her lap.

Jarring, of course, the thigh he had kicked so hard three years before. It’s a shock, sudden—she bites down on what just happens to be his tongue, stops when she feels unyielding tissue under her teeth, but already she can taste blood. Jindosh reacts instinctually, jerks back—tongue caught for a moment before Emily lets go, a yelp of pain from both of them. Jindosh’s hand covers his mouth while she hisses and scrabbles at the ties of her pants, bracing her shoulders against the wall so she can shove them down and off. The bruise is mottled angry red and dark blue-black, even only a few hours later.

Jindosh’s fingers come away from his lip with spit and blood on them, and the look he shoots her is resentful, before he settles on the bruise and wipes his mouth with his knuckles.

“I’m sorry,” she says, and he shakes his hand, going to the sink and washing his mouth out with water, spitting pink into the porcelain.

She shoves the loose pants the rest of the way down, and then onto the floor. She nearly feels apologetic, for all that he caused it.

“If I lisp,” he says, “at the Duke’s party, it will not win me admirers.”

The second apology comes slower, but she offers it anyway.

“I’m sorry.”

He seems soothed by it, turning away from the sink. He picks back over her room, and settles on the crossbow, taking it into his hands and turning it over. Her lack of complaint stands as testament enough to her actual bad feelings about biting him.

He’s doing something with the reloading mechanism on her crossbow, bringing it closer to see whatever mechanism is giving him pause.

“I could improve the range on this,” he offers, with no trace of a slur so far. “Just adjust this, and—”

“Have you asked Meagan when she needs me back out there?” The Clockworks were terrifying, but isn’t that an argument in favor of allowing him to meddle with her gear?

“The Duke’s party. The day after tomorrow.” He hisses in frustration as his fingers slip, unable to adjust tiny mechanisms without tools, and the porcelain lacking the control of fingertips.

“Could you finish in time?” she asks. He looks nearly offended, but tucks the crossbow against his side.

“Of course. Assuming Sokolov has all the needed supplies on board, it is the work of an hour, perhaps two.”

The deadline is acceptable, if exaggeratedly fast, and she lays back on her cot, yanking her pillow into place under her neck and watching him through half-lidded eyes. Sleep, when it finally catches her, is going to drag her down for the full night, with no nightmares. And since they’ve moved away from kissing for the moment, she deems it fit to continue to pry information from him—better him than Meagan.

“Your Clockworks,” she leads, expecting him to take up the thread and run with it. He purses his lips, and sets down her crossbow, and pulls out the chair at her makeshift desk. He sits with his legs spread, hunched over, elbows resting on his legs. Jindosh has awful posture, but cramped as the room is, and with her laying down, they’d be forced into intimacy no matter how he sat.

“The Duke denied another request for funding,” he mourns. “My Sentinels could be so much more, and yet his small-mindedness keeps me from truly achieving greatness.”

“He fears you,” she says. “What you could be. Does he suspect?”

“No,” Jindosh says, all confidence. “He thinks me loyal.”

“To him?”

“To myself, and him through that. The carrot he offers—offered, I have enough of my own—was wealth, and opportunity. Connections with the finer set of Karnaca. Customers.”

Idly, Emily thinks that worse than a suspected allegiance to a person. No code to compel you, and betrayal was always on the table. Even the witches had possessed a sort of cohesion. Worshipping Delilah meant that the worst of the squabbles for power were contained—there’d be no toppling her, and anything that incapacitated another witch left one less for the cause, and that was a crime.

“And now?” Her head turns to look at him, her hair unwound against the sheets. She is no great beauty—too much of her father in her face—but the air of majesty about her like a mantle enhances handsome features.

“I have my own money,” Jindosh states, pride behind his words. “I could build myself back up to great heights if he expelled me from Karnaca. I have my reputation, and my knowledge.”

He taps his temple, smiling.

“Luca cannot destroy me. My legacy is already in place. You cannot unlearn something—my inventions will beckon a new age. He cannot unmake them.”

Jindosh wants to be remembered. The vulnerability in that runs through him like a flaw through a diamond, and Emily is struck by him in that moment. It dawns on her, great and terrible, just another of the epiphanies she’s had in the past weeks. He’s right—the Clockworks have been made. They are possible. Eventually, the schemata will disseminate into the wider world of scientific knowledge, like the use of whale oil, and people will adapt and build off of them—

—but Kirin Jindosh will have always been the first, and unless she thinks of time the way she imagines the Outsider must, he will be _remembered_. For as long as the Empire exists, for the thing he made with his own hands, he will be remembered.

And he will make more than just the Clockworks. He’s at the beginning of all he could do, all he will do. How much has he already revolutionized?

“You don’t need me,” she murmurs, and reaches out a languid hand to cup his cheek. He half-rises in his chair, enough to clear it, and then sinks to his knees beside the cot, eyes attentively on hers. “Royal patronage will hardly do more for you than you could do for yourself.”

Abele has already debuted him, so to speak. And the accolades she’s offered him at the Academy will soothe his wounded pride. She could demote him—ruin him, jail him—but he would find a way to rise, to make himself comfortable—if his mouthing off didn’t get him in trouble first. He’s that sort of starvingly determined.

“You pick apart your own arguments so well, Emily,” he says. “The point of an advantage is to press it, not relinquish it. How sloppy of you.”

“Are you goading me?” she asks. Rolling onto her side, she props her cheek on her fist. She is too battle-worn to look coquettish in such a pose, but she can manage playful. She can appreciate the lure of him—but she already had the world on a string. She knows power like she knows breathing.

She offers him her hand, palm-up to the flaking metal ceiling, like a swain offering a lady a dance, and he takes it, fingers curling around her own.

“Mind my thigh,” she chides, as he comes to straddle her on the thin cot, already tugging down her sleeping pants around her legs and then off one ankle only, her sun bleached linen top unbuttoned and flung open to expose her chest, the vulnerability of her ribs.

He, sitting above her, takes her other hand, and gazes down at the Mark. She allows it, but he lets go sooner than she would expect his curiosity to allow him to and makes use of the hand to undo his trousers instead. Only half-hard, he drapes himself over her again and resumes kissing her, which she responds to hungrily. His hand cups the back of her head, caught between it and the pillow, and they lay chest to chest, breathing harder as they accustom themselves to the reality of the moment. He is not shy—he has been waiting two years, and Emily regrets the lapse in memory that means that whatever transpired between them in the space between arriving and the choices she made at Stilton’s estate is like an old, warped record. She cannot hold onto the thoughts, but she has impressions—they have been on this bed before, kissing like this. Her on top, her shirt buttoned, riding him—if she grasps at the memories, it is like grasping at snowflakes that melt before they can be accurately observed.

Jindosh draws a hand between her breasts, down her stomach, and between her legs. Two searching fingers find her wet and warm. Her thighs open to let him better settle between them, take himself in hand, and surges into her, an exhale as the last bit of distance between them is erased.

Between her injury and his methodical thrusts, they settled into an intimacy framed by interactions with one another that the other cannot recall. He knows where the sweet spot on her throat is, and makes use of that knowledge, though she cannot imagine when he would have learned. She can measure his breathing and keeps a hand at the small of his back, the pinpricks of her nails a better reminder than scoring his flesh with them.

The slowness makes it intimate. She neither the weight of the Fugue Feast’s final bell or a trip back through a dangerous quarter to pull her from the moment. He’s a tangle of anticipation and there isn’t any way to be with one another but so terribly close.

She reaches the point of hitching breath and impatient rolls of her hips before he’s any more affected than a lock of hair sprung free and over his forehead. On the tiny cot, there’s a necessary amount of shuffling before he can thrust harder without the cot creaking like its about to shatter. He has the manners to make sure she comes first—a barely arched back and a whine like the hiss of escaping steam before she falls heavy against the mattress. His own end is clumsy, his forehead against her shoulder and a handful of jackrabbit thrusts before he spills inside her.

There’s very little glamour to it. The shine of frantic coupling is scrubbed off when they’re alone on an old ship that rocks gently in the harbor. No dramatic Fugue inclinations, her hands away from his neck. She now knows how little pressure it takes to kill a man that way. They just lay on the cot, sweat drying and Jindosh taking his handkerchief to wipe the come from between her thighs before it can stain the mattress and then cleaning himself.

There’s no glamour, and it’s peaceful, and before he goes he refills the tin cup she keeps by her beside for water while she rebuttons her top and slides her smalls and pants both back on.

“What’s the Sister’s name?” she asks, as he’s about to slip out the door and to his own cot.

“Lena Rosewyn,” he says, and she nods, sleepy. “Meagan will wake you.”

He closes the door, shutting off the bulb that burned dimly. The room is dark, and she is warm, and tired, and exhausted in a different way than the pain of a long, hard-fought day.

She sleeps without dreaming, without moving in her sleep, and she wakes to the cabin lit by morning light. She can hear movement in the main cabin, and so she wakes and washes her face hastily. Her morning use of the head means she gets to look at the bruise. It’s healing yellow and blue, just another reminder of what the Mark does for her. Tender to the touch still, it will be gone by nightfall.

The clothes she puts on aren’t much different from the ones she wore to bed, just cleaner and not set aside for bed. Patched, she knows they were Meagan’s beforehand, but the cotton is worn enough to be soft. Remembering the presence of the Sister, she puts on boots, and twists her hair into the updo she favors, the one she wore when Anton painted her portrait for the coinage and decrees. The fabric wrapping is replaced with fingerless gloves for both hands, and she scrubs the last traces of dirt from out under her nails.

She does not have the wardrobe or the inclination to make herself up to seem imposing. But she carries herself like an Empress and always has, and it will be enough.

The four of them—Jindosh, Meagan, Sokolov, and Byrne—are sitting around the workbench, and turn to look at her as she crosses the threshhold. She recalls Byrne only faintly, with the haze she attributes to all memories that were changed by her actions in the time-that-wasn’t. Sleep seems to have ironed some of them flat.

“Vice Overseer,” she greets, and steps forward to offer her hand, which he takes with all the well-trained manners of one of the Abbey. He’s a large man, muscled and strong in the way the Abbey encourages, but the Serkonian sun has worn lines in his face in a way that suggests a childhood in one of the cloudier Isles. Any accent has been worn away by time in the Abbey. She has no measure of him, does not know him with the certainty she knows High Overseer Khulan, but he does not hold her hand too long or for too little, and betrays no indication he believes or suspects there’s something under the gloves.

“I’m glad to know High Overseer Khulan is well,” he says, and Emily lets her face betray no hint of the easing pressure on her mind. Khulan's life, another thing she owes Jindosh for, another reason why the bargain was worth making.

“Yes,” she says. “Once I am back on my throne, his contributions to the throne will be acknowledged. He is a good man, when few are. He served me since I was just a child.”

She slides the warning and lure for his ambition into the conversation, although she hopes he will not need it. Byrne releases her hand, and gestures to a woman standing in the shadows to the side of the room, regarding the blackboard. Meagan is watching her furtively—Emily only catches it when Meagan catches her eye and holds it—Meagan, naturally, does not trust her.

That’s fine. Emily isn’t inclined to trust her either.

“Oracle,” she greets, and sketches the appropriate curtsey despite her outfit. Rarely had even the Empress seen one of the Oracular Order. They preferred to use the Overseers as their mouthpieces, and until the Tower, she had never seen one fail to act towards the Sisters as the Overseers’ wolfhounds obey them. She had received missives once or twice from the High Oracle, though she cannot recall a name, and her position meant that a few Sisters had deigned to leave their chapels for the highest of holy days, but their cloistered existence left her bereft of practical knowledge. She only had what protocol and Corvo had told her, which was simple at the core—utmost politeness. If even the Overseers walked quietly around them, then caution was best.

“Empress Emily,” Rosewyn says. She is perhaps the age Emily’s mother would be were she alive, perhaps older. There is a dignity to her—she knows who she is, same as Emily. She has done a magnificent job of ignoring the other people in the room.

Sokolov stands, chair scraping against the floor.

“I’ll make coffee,” he says, to the unresponsive room, and walks off towards the ship’s galley.

Jindosh looks up from the small piece of metal he’s polishing, fingers no longer working the cloth.

“I’ve found I like the morning air,” Emily says. “Maybe we should have this conversation abovedeck.”

With Meagan so on the edge she’s nearly spitting, and Sokolov’s heretical works and notes likely shoved under papers hastily, at least they won’t be walled in if they’re on the deck. Imperceptibly, she gets the sense that Rosewyn nods, and she and Byrne and Rosewyn make for the deck, Meagan winding up before them and lingering at the doorway while the three of them step out onto the deck, Karnaca laid out in the early dawn light.

“Sister Rosewyn,” Emily starts. “I understand there’s something you would like to tell me about Delilah.”

Not ‘my aunt’. Not ‘the witch’. Rosewyn strikes her as someone who thinks in absolutes—much like Byrne does, much like most of the Abbey does, and Emily doesn’t have the time to play those particular games. So she calls Delilah what she is, and that only.

“Using heretical methods, Delilah and her witches have found a way to corrupt my sisters,” Rosewyn says. Emily recalls the renewed scene in the throne room—smiling Clockworks, a troop of Oracular Sisters, Khulan’s voice asking ‘what the meaning of this is, High Oracle’—and the terrified screams of her court. But fewer screams. The Clockworks just a touch slower, a few confused pauses on behalf of the Overseers upon seeing their Sisters walk hand-in-hand with witches and demand the slaughter of the court. But seconds were everything—and there was less blood on the floor of the Tower.

“My Sisters spoke falsely,” Rosewyn says, the failure of her Order caught between her teeth like a grist mill. “The witch Delilah is not the proper Empress. You are. They have led the Overseers astray, but for a few, and many Sisters as well.”

Admitting that the blind and absolute loyalties of the Overseers to the Oracles may have been turned against her is clearly painful, but she does it. And those few who disobeyed, that is more worrying still.

Rosewyn continues, back ramrod straight. “We will put our house back in order, those few of us who remain uncorrupted—in this we need no aid.”

The cudgel at her hip will serve well enough, Emily knows.

“—but I will need safe transportation to Dunwall,” the Oracle says. “I must join my Brothers and the Lord Protector in their fight and make ready for your return. I am the most senor Oracle left pure. The task is mine and mine alone. The Overseers will need our guidance.”

The fact lifts her just as it weighs on her shoulder.

“Of course, Sister Rosewyn,” Emily says. “How many will need transportation?”

Rosewyn eyes the Wale, then the city.

“Fifteen at most,” she says. “I will not leave Karnaca undefended.”

Meagan speaks up, unfolding her arms and pushing back from the wall. “I know someone who could arrange it,” she says. “Tonight. The quarters are cramped, but they’ll have it done. It’ll cost y—”

“The Abbey will pay,” Rosewyn distains.

“And the Crown will reimburse,” Emily soothes. “Once I am back on my throne. If that’s acceptable…?”

Rosewyn nods, approval smoothing some of the rougher edges. She had to provide very little information to get Emily to agree—but only because Emily knows exactly what happened. Did she visit the Royal Conservatory? Or did Meagan send her somewhere else—she cannot recall. But Rosewyn is bolstered by Emily’s trust of her, and that is worth far more.

“I’ll bring you back to the mainland, Sister,” Byrne offers, and Rosewyn turns to look at him, some unspoken message passing between the two of them.

“I’ll get you the information for my contact,” Meagan says, heading belowdeck.

Emily watches her go, and startles at the hand on her arm, the fingers curled not unkindly around her arm. Rosewyn gazes into her face, looking, searching, and then away, shaking her head.

“You walk a divergent path, Emily Kaldwin,” Rosewyn says, the most emotional in her amazement than she’s ever been. “Beware the one who makes their own downfall.”

The Oracle lets her go, her touch light enough that it barely causes the fabric to wrinkle around her hold, and crosses the deck to join Meagan and Bryne speaking by the skiff. She hears the sound of footsteps thudding up the metal steps, and turns to see Sokolov and Jindosh coming up to join them. Nursing his own cup of dark coffee, Jindosh comes to join her on the middle of the deck, passing her one far less offensive, the milky color closer to the color of Corvo’s hair then the small shard of Void that seems to be living in Jindosh’s mug. She takes a sip, finds it acceptably sweet, and lets it warm her hands. Sokolov pulls the lever for Meagan that lowers the skiff into the lapping morning tide, and before long, the party of three is making their way to shore.

“I thought you needed to return to Karnaca to prepare for the Duke’s party tomorrow night,” Emily notes, glancing over towards Jindosh, still staring after the skiff, mug in one hand.

“Later,” he dismisses. “When Meagan returns.”

“I’m surprised she hasn’t yelled at you for making her play courier,” she notes.

“She did. I offered to build a second skiff, and pilot it myself. She found the current arrangement more agreeable, but reminded me her… generous nature had limits.” He shrugged, and took a sip of his coffee. “We have come to an arrangement.”

“You don’t like the Sister, do you?”

“No.” Now he looks at her, quizzical. “What did she say to you?”

“Prophetic nonsense,” Emily admits, and in a moment of inspiration. “The Outsider was almost clearer with his—suggestion.”

Jindosh sighs.

“I’ve never found a use for soothesayers. She seeks to shape your behavior through her suggestions, cleverly worded and shrouded in half-truths as they are. I would ignore it.”

“I am,” Emily cuts back.

Quiet reigns, and they both work through their mugs. Sokolov has wandered to the stern, and then back inside, leaving them along.

“I finished modifying your crossbow,” Jindosh says, when he’s down to the grainy sugar sludge at the bottom of his cup. “I’ve left it on the work table. The range will be quiet improved in comparison to what you were working with.”

In his credit, he does not sound _insufferably_ proud of himself. His smile is private.

“Thank you,” she says. “I hope I won’t need it—if everything goes well with the Duke, it will be quiet. In and out, and then back here and making for Dunwall before the sun rises.”

“I will need to state my objection once more at being left behind,” he says.

The knowledge comes back to her, laps at her mind, though her gives it time to come to her, for the two timelines to unite. No pain, this time.

“I need you and Stilton and Hypatia here,” she argues. “You three will hold Serkonos in my name until Dunwall is free. Then I’ll send for you.”

“Anton could stay,” he says, in the tone of one who has been forced to make this point before.

“Anton wasn’t born here. Anton doesn’t know the city like you do.”

“If you leave me here—”

“Forget you? As if you would allow it.” She bumps her hip against his. Caffeine and a restful sleep make her companionable. A sweet roll or apricot tart would make her downright happy, but she thinks that would be too much to ask. He, not expecting it, starts—but then relaxes.

“You’ll be in Dunwall soon enough,” she promises, and spots the returning speck of the skiff on the horizon. “And have everything I promised. Have you asked Sokolov about how often he was harassed once he had ‘Royal’ before his title? From Grand Inventor to Royal is a leap more than a step. I imagine you’ll be receiving far more requests for commissions than you did here. So many people will want to meet you—”

The horror on his face is delightful. She finishes her mug and moves to take his. He drops it, and a wrinkle of a frown shakes the expression off his face. She leaves him on the deck and goes below, about to wash the mugs in the sink. Sokolov is in the galley when she arrives, cutting a plantain into thin rounds.

“I never thought I would see him distracted by anything that wasn’t vivisected or a threat to his ego,” Sokolov drops casually.

“He’ll tire of it soon enough,” Emily says, running enough water to dissolve the last of the sugar from the very bottom of Jindosh’s cup. A waste to run it down the drain, but the other option would have been to watch him spoon it out, and she doesn’t need to witness that. “Life at court will exhaust him, or I’ll fall from being his object of—fascination. An interesting new species of beetle will replace me and he will return to his mansion.”

“Will it upset you to be upstaged by a beetle?”

“Conceptually,” Emily admits. “Would I be a good Empress if I said no?”

Sokolov laughs, and she steals a few slices of his breakfast.

The engine of the skiff gets louder, and she and Sokolov return to deck, but not before the older man grabs what she assumes is Jindosh’s case from their worktable and bring it with him. Jindosh nods when he sees it, throwing the strap over his shoulder and making use of the rope ladder rather than having Meagan winch the skiff up again.

Emily leans over the rail to watch him descend. Meagan gives her a nod, still at the tiller, and when Jindosh jumps the last foot or so, he looks up at her while he sits.

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” she says. “Once the Duke is dead, secure the palace with the Clockworks. Silton will have the rest of the city. I’ll—”

“You’ll send a ship once Dunwall is yours,” he finishes. “You think I've forgotten the plan?”

She scoffs, and leans back and away from the rail. Meagan starts the motor back up on the skiff, and she watches Jindosh wave at her before settling into his seat, the skiff once more making for Karnaca in the distance.


	7. VI: The Grand Palace, Karnaca 1852

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hate using game dialogue, but there's no reason to reinvent the wheel.

Emily has learned a great deal about Luca Abele during her short time in Karnaca. There are things expected of her as Empress—‘to whom much is given, much is expected’ intones her mother’s voice, in her mind and from the Heart—and one of those is, at least, a public inclination towards piety. She obeys the Strictures, nominally, because it isn’t as if it’s difficult to put forward a good face. It’s more what one _doesn’t_  do than what one _does_. And besides, Khulan is (was) an excellent High Overseer, and more concerned with the intention of people’s actions than the outcome.

But Luca Abele seems to adore flaunting his flagrant disregard for every single Stricture—and dragging down everyone he can with him. Not that she can judge, really. She’s the one with the Outsider’s Mark. She doubts the Outsider gives half a fig about the Strictures broken in his name—or the champagne Abele is in the process of pouring over the breasts of one of the female party-goers at the moment. She wished she didn’t need to see every detail of the act, but the Duke’s body double had wanted her to be careful, so that meant surveillance, learning the particular habits of the guards with him this evening, waiting for the best time to strike. And the way that this party was going, she’d be on the roof all night, and hoping the Duke eventually made his way to his bedroom, which she’d peppered with stun mines. Patience was the key to the switch that would leave a very obliged ‘Abele’ in her pocket, and an easy transition for the city once Delilah was off the throne.

The ache in her thigh is mostly gone, soothed away with a hot soak and the stretches that Meagan had showed her, but she knelt with her weight on the other side, favoring it so it wouldn’t be as tender when she needed to move. Watching the partygoers drink, and laugh, and generally debauch themselves, she wonders once more how things here could have gotten so bad without her noticing.

There are reasons for that, she reminds herself, and she has plans to ensure it doesn’t happen again. Two coups in any Empress’ rule is far too many, but she’s learned lessons she would have never learned any other way. Lessons the Crown needs, will fail without. For all the Empire’s faults, there is no war, no continuous battles for territory among the island-states.

And besides—restoring Stilton’s sanity has improved the condition of Karnaca. There are fewer beggars on the street. Hypatia either never became the Crown Killer, or the bloodfly infestations and errant diseases never got as bad. The Howlers are barely worth mentioning. The Overseers seem more focused on ferreting out some sort of new Outsider worship than gaining complete control of the city. Everything can be addressed, here and on the other isles, thought it will be the work of a lifetime. And once Delilah is gone, she will do it.

Despite her woolgathering, the party has gone on. She catches the Duke slapping the backside of one of the staff tasked with bending to offer finger foods to the various guests reclining on fainting couches or pillows along the patio. They’ve—thirty or so guests and the Duke, plus guards—arranged themselves around a sheet-covered something placed against the wall, with a cable snaking out from under the sheet and connected to a whale oil tank. He is holding court in front of it.

If she’s waiting, she might as well hear what they’re discussing, and so she retracts the spyglass, slipping it back into her coat, and makes her way across the beams, low and slow, until the wind blows just right and she can hear Abele’s voice clearly, glad, for once, of his particular way of speaking that carries so well across distances. He’s near enough that she could shoot him with her crossbow. She has considered it—one death, and she could go home and take back her throne. But she wants the elegant solution, and she’s come so far with so little blood on her hands that she wants to preserve that. How can she hold her head high if she turns indiscriminate butcher?

“—settle down, settle down,” Abele booms, waving his hands around like a maestro, his glass in hand and sloshing champagne all over his meaty fingers. He holds one up in the air and, with everyone’s attention on him, starts to pontificate.

“Thank you all for coming to my home this evening—” and Emily allows her attention to slip, her eyes skipping from guest to guest, with no great focus on any particular one. Their dress is not so indulgent as for her to mistake the crowd for the Boyles’ Masquerade, but there is certainly more than a fair share of wealth in the silks and jewels on display. How well many of them have preserved their skin from the sun impresses her—but, then again, they only come out at night, and the moon is kinder.

“—a _special treat_ for you tonight,” Abele says, relishing the tittering that starts among his guests as they try to guess just what it is. Heads turn, looking around them—at the banquet table, at one another, curious and delighted. Abele savors the moment, letting it linger. He has a talent for oration, if nothing of the other skills important in a ruler. He licks his lips, so proud that Emily cannot help but focus in, sure that news will follow about Delilah, some new horror in Dunwall.

The Duke does not have the patience to let it sit overlong, and besides, with all the side conversation, the attention is drifting away from him, which, by the sudden twist of his mouth, he cannot abide.

“Settle down!” he shouts, that good humor stripped away, and the guests halt and give him their attention. He smiles, basking in it, childish pleasure.

“I reward those loyal to me! I am a very generous man, very generous. But I am also,” he says, face darkening, “just! Righteous in my anger, for I, your Duke, give you everything! I raised many of you higher than you dreamed, and you were born noble. If I gave a man who had nothing everything, he would be right to kiss my boots and thank me every day for my kindness. To betray me should have been unthinkable.”

A bloodbath of some sort for his guests. Emily should not be as sicken as she is by the revelation, if she can call it that. The Duke is entirely that sort of man, an absolute animal.

There is a commotion under her feet, where the house meets the patio. They are dragging someone out from inside the house. She sees the crowd of guests part in anticipation, and two guards bring a man between them, a bag over his head. He does not fight overmuch—the guards are frogmarching him, and if there is a struggle, it is for the man to take one step after the other and not allow himself to be dragged. His clothes are well-tailored, if scuffed, the cuffs of his sleeves open, cufflinks lost and blood speckling the white linen of his shirt where it shows, his jacket torn open, buttons missing.

“No,” Emily says, rising out of her crouch as the guards and the man reach Abele. With one swift tug, he pulls the canvas off the man’s head, and it is Jindosh—mouth bloodied and eyes blackened.

“The Grand Inventor!” shouts the Duke, working himself up into a froth. “I raised him from the gutter. I thought his mind worth the risk, but he proved treacherous. He betrayed me! Betrayed the Empress— _he has been working with the usurper_ , Emily Attano.”

A gasp from the crowd, and the sheet is yanked away from the device behind the Duke. It is a chair, like the ones the dentists use, with a helmet of sorts and cuffs at the ankles and wrists. There is a lever next to it, connected by thick wire, like the one that leads from the chair to the whale oil tank. Now, Jindosh fights like a cornered animal, but the guards are large and he has clearly been through a great deal today. Somehow, he knows to look to the roof and over that distance, he meets her eyes, panic and fear writ large across his face. He is caught off balance in that moment, and the guards take the opportunity to shove him into the chair. They are rough with him, with getting his hands into the cuffs—he screams in pain when they slam one arm down against the arm of the chair, his fingers caught at an awful angle. Emily pulls her pistol from her side, loads it—and over all of this, Luca is still talking.

“Ladies and gentlemen, we will make him humble once more, with this, a device of his own design, commissioned by me, your Duke, for the reformation of our most unruly citizens.”

She loads the pistol and takes aim as the guards strap Jindosh’s head in and the Duke finishes his speech, fingers curls around the lever and yanking. She links them together with her Mark, binds their heartbeats, and fires. The chair alights, and Jindosh’s is the first scream among the crowd.

All three heads explode in a mess of gore at the exact same moment, meat and shards of bone spraying out, three bodies slumping and collapsing like puppets with their strings cut. Abele, of considerable girth, wavers on his feet, before toppling back.

The guests scatter like so many colorful songbirds, yelling and trampling over one another in their flight, desperate to flee the scene, afraid they’re next, but the only sound Emily focuses on is Jindosh’s scream. She hears the yell of a guard and runs down the tiles of the roof, reaching instead of jumping from the edge and landing in the space they’ve so recently vacated. She has to free him—the screaming has not stopped, and his body jerks in the chair, back arched and straining at the leather straps that keep his arms and legs in place. But Emily must turn her back on him to fire at the guard who ran forward, at first to somehow help the Duke, and now to confront her. Again, she draws upon her Mark, making use of all six bullets in the gun she has not fired since before the coup, dropping them as they draw either their swords or their guns. One is a veteran, by the medals on her chest, and she hangs back, having caught on. It leaves Emily unable to link her to the others, and so she alone does not fall in that first wave. The bodies of her comrades fall, and she takes deadly aim. Emily can see the wrinkles around her eyes, the humanity of her—the solid stance, the years to get to this point—and so when she draws her sword, preternaturally quick, and deflects the bullet before shooting her own pistol, she feels a keen regret.

She has killed more people in one night than she has in the month since the coup. If she had allowed herself this at the start, could she have saved more lives? In keeping to the shadows, how much pain has she caused? The printer she had passed by in Dunwall comes back to her. Had she protected him, killed the thug to do so, would that have been the better choice?

She lets the thought go. More guards will come soon—they will have heard the commotion, the screaming.

It is a brutal slaughter, and she drops the gun once she has emptied it, turning back to Jindosh in the chair, where he slumps now, no longer fighting his bindings. His head lolls back, and she counts the seconds as her fingers scrabble at the buckles, undoing the leather straps. He has a pulse—he still blinks, although his eyes are glazed over and unseeing, failing to wholly focus on her face.

“Kirin,” she says, her arm snaking under his shoulders so she can support him, his arm haphazardly draped over her back. “Kirin, you need to help me.”

A bullet pings off the chair, and Emily realizes that there are guards inside the basement, taking shots out of the small window level to the patio. Her Mark burns—she has Hypatia’s tonic on her belt, but she’s not in a place to use it. Jindosh is still unresponsive, dead weight with a pulse. He mumbles something, but her hyperawareness does not extend to deciphering it. She reaches, and they land on a low beam. Emily, without a pistol, pulls out her crossbow, judging the timing, and takes aim at the whale oil tank, firing. In the same moment, she reaches again and they’re on the highest point of the roof. Shouts from the guards below—she disappeared in a haze of smoke, and they will write it off later as battle fog, she hopes, but for now they are occupied with dowsing the fire that so hungrily eats at the wood and bodies on the patio.

There’s the scattered detritus of a handyman’s work on the elevator, and she sets Jindosh down against the wall. His pupils are drunkenly huge, no fight in him as she grasps his chin, turns him from side to side to look at him. There are patches of red, blistered skin at his temples, and he smells like burning hair and fear. For one brief moment, his eyes narrow, focus.

“Where am I?” he says, like his mouth is too heavy and too much an effort to work. “It hurts,” he says, pitiful, like a child, and he looks up at her with wide, frightened eyes.

He is too trusting, and with none of the uncanny cleverness that had so marked him before. She will have to carry him out of here—he is no use to her.

“Stay silent,” she says. Emily drinks down the elixir Hypatia had supplied her with, tossing the emptied glass vial onto the roof, where it clatters in a roll before stopping halfway down. To Jindosh, she offers Sokolov’s concoction—and when he stares at it dumbly, she cups the back of his head and pours it into his mouth, doubly and absurdly glad that he does not fight her and that he also swallows without fuss.

She needs to access the vault, where the Duke has hidden away the effigy that houses what remains of Delilah’s soul. She needs to get Jindosh to Hypatia, and see if she can’t—heal him. Undo some of the damage. There is likely more than she can see, internal damage. The way he holds his arm—tight, to his side—means the guards might have broken bones during the struggle.

“Where am I?” he says, again, speaking with that same dazed inflection. Another owlish blink. He’s too injured to recall much, but he isn’t struggling. She’ll make do.

“Get up,” Emily says, and he struggles to his feet. There’s still smoke coming from the balcony, but it’s lighter. The guards’ occupation with stopping that disaster will only last so long. Once Kirin is standing, she drapes his arm over her shoulder again, wraps the other about his waist. She can reach like this, and he’ll stay attached to her side—and that’s how they move, making for the glass top of the gazebo and the vault beneath.

Guards are searching—she spots one or two guests huddled in bolt-holes against the wall, quivering—but the overall atmosphere is still chaos. Down below the gazebo, there’s the little section of dock where Meagan said she’d bring the skiff once she was finished. She looks down through the glass—there’s an arc pylon, but it’s been disabled, the whale oil tank discarded and laying on its side.

She drops down to the ground in a flurry of smoke (never has her Mark burned like this from so much intense use, she will need another of Hypatia’s elixirs soon) and Jindosh only exhales sharply. She will leave him on the stairs when she descends into the vault; she will not subject him to whatever she will need to do to destroy the idol.

And then she hears the whirring and anbaric crackle.

The Clockwork is wholly different from any she’d seen before, in Jindosh’s mansion or in Karnaca. The beaked head has been replaced with a porcelain one. This one seems more civilized, somehow, elegant and bone-white, and less than one reach of the still razor-sharp arms away from them.

Emily does not move. Jindosh, too, remains still. The machine is enough to strike fear into even him—or perhaps it is some dim animal recognition of his own creation.

The Clockwork whirs, clicking attentively, the cyclopean camera pointed down at them, the mouth in a perpetual smile, before Jindosh’s voice echoes out from a tinny speaker.

“This plays when the machine has found me wounded or dead. Likely at the hands of Abele, the sop. Combat protocol zero. Let’s hope it buys me time.”

Resolute, the machine turns away, lurching towards the entrance of the gazebo, seeming to return to its normal patrol route. Emily lets out a shaky exhale, and turns to the vault, setting Jindosh down so she can open the heavy door. No. she can’t leave him outside—he must, at least, come partway down and keep shielded that way.

“I think I’ve lost something,” he says, when she goes to pick up once more, shuffling them inside and closing the door. He turns his head to look at her, struggling down the first couple of stairs. “Something important. Can you help me find it?”

In an attempt to get him to work with her, she nods. “It’s down here,” Emily promises, and he seems to be a bit more willing to put one foot in front of the other, at least until they reach the halfway point of the staircase, marked by a landing. She shrugs his arm off, and sets him down gentle. He goes, not even attempting to stand after she’s put him down, already slumping against the wall, curled in on himself.

“Stay here,” she says. “I’ll be right back.”

She creeps down to the bottom level. This time, she hears the Clockwork before she sees it, and it acknowledges her with a cool recalibrational clank after the head has tracked her for long enough.

“Nonhostile profile: Emily Kaldwin,” it says, in Jindosh’s voice, as it _should be_. And then it resumes its patrol, circling the room endlessly. She lets it be and walks to the thorned mass in the middle of the room.

The effigy is like something out of a nightmare. Something makes it like the Void—rocks, shed bark from the vines—they float, suspended in the air. Yet it feels utterly different from the Void she knows from her dreams, and that once and only where the Outsider had pulled her in, made her *fall*.

This is the Void Delilah will make, and someone it feels even more cold and alien to her than the one she knows. The Heart is beating a tattoo in her jacket pocket, and it is with slow, fearful hands that she pulls it out. It throbs in her hand, as if it is trying to leap free. Smoke issues from it, coalesces.

It is her mother. It is Jessamine.

“This is it,” Jessamine says, not unkindly. “You must release me from this dead vessel. Only then will you be able to trap Delilah’s spirit.”

“I don’t know if I can do this,” she confesses. “You were all I ever wanted.”

Her voice breaks. How many times had she been compared to Jessamine, and found wanting? How often had she longed for a mother—for someone to have borne the brunt of the attention of the nobles, a parent she could have been openly affectionate with. Guidance, beyond what Corvo could have given her. She has had Jessamine back for but a month, and now, fifteen years later, she has to let go *again*.

Jessamine senses her distress. She always has. “I stayed as long as I could, trying to guide you. The world is better for your influence.”

The hand offered out—the hand Emily grasps—is ghostly, more shadow and smoke than reality, but it feels solid, and if that is because she is hoping hard enough to make it true, then she will not fight it.

“Be at peace, mother. I will honor you always,” she says, and her voice does not shake.

“Oh, Emily,” her mother murmurs. “I love you, and this is the final thought I carry into nothingness.”

As the wings of the effigy are dragged apart, and she must grip the heart with both hands to prevent it from being pulled into light that explodes from its chest and radiates outward, she hears the patrolling Clockwork explode and another scream of terror from Jindosh. The flesh of the Heart blackens and quivers in her grasp, and once the storm has settled, it speaks.

“What’s this? The heart of my half-sister? Only her flesh remains,” it croons, and she stuffs it back into her jacket pocket, sickened by the closeness of it but having no better place for it.

The Clockwork is a scattered pile of metal components and shattered ceramic that crunches underfoot as she walks back up to where she hid Jindosh. He has pressed himself to the corner, made himself as small as possible. His eyes track her, wide with fear but not looking away for a moment. She summons patience despite her exhaustion, the terrible wish to not have to be. She must get back to the Wale. She must get Jindosh to safety. Hypatia can care for him.

Emily crouches down, beckons him closer—reaches for his arm, which he yanks away.

“We have to go, Kirin,” she says, soft. She waits for him to adjust to the idea of her like she would with a frightened wolfhound. “More will be coming.”

And slowly—too slow for her liking, he unfolds his long legs and attaches himself to her side.

“Oh, girl,” the Heart says. “He’s lost to you know, lost to himself. Clever Kirin, what is he when all that made him worthwhile has been stripped away?”

“Shut up,” Emily hisses—and Jindosh hears and flinches when the Heart takes no heed, radiating pleasure at the cut of its words.

“I'm sorry,” she says, to him, and reaches for the top of the stairs.

“Do you want to know what he thought of you? Bedding an empress, what a delightful trick for a boy who had to fight his siblings for scraps.”

The Heart sounds delighted.

At the door to the Vault stands the Sentinel. It watches them exit, and Emily does not look at what lays at its feet, only thankful that they encounter no further resistance as they get down to the meeting place along the rocks.

The sight of Meagan bringing the skiff along, engine dead and only the currents bringing her in—Emily has never seen anything better.

“He’s injured,” she says. “He needs Hypatia. Now.”

Meagan only needs the most cursory of looks before she spits out, “Shit!” and stands, reaching for him and helping Emily bring him aboard. He goes like a sack of flower, no coordination, whining in his throat from fear and exhaustion. Once he’s settled, Meagan dismisses the pretext of secrecy—and has already, with those keen eyes of hers, found the blood on the two of them—and the engine roars to get them out of the inlet, driving them into deeper waters where the Dreadful Wale waits.

* * *

Emily has never been one for bedside vigils. All the deaths in her life have been swift—no drawn-out illnesses. She never knew anyone with the Plague. Pietro’s wasting disease had been his whole life with her—even his death had seemed unexpected, and sudden.

Once, when she was thirteen, she had broken her leg. It had seemingly been the end of the Empire, given how everyone had fussed and paled and acted as if this was her death. Sokolov had been the only one halfway normal about it—but then he’d told her what he’d need to do to realign and set the bone. She would have thrown a tantrum, if she’d been able to move from her bed without pain.

Corvo had sat vigil then, right by the bed. He’d let her hold his hand—let her dig her nails in, draw blood, as three grown men had held her down while Sokolov worked. While she screamed and begged and did all the things that Corvo had been trained to react to by putting a knife in any complicit party. But instead he had sat very still, and looked at her, and let her shred and strangle his hand with her own smaller one.

This vigil has none of the drama. It is silent. Delilah's soul had continued to whisper hate, and so she had locked the Heart in her room. Hypatia had taken Jindosh into her rooms, then called for Sokolov—and now it is her and Meagan abovedeck, smoking Stilton’s cigars and waiting. Sokolov had sent them abovedeck. ‘Hideously practical’, he’d said. ‘Can’t help and you know you can’t help, so you should stay away.’

Emily, meanwhile, wants another hand to shred or to scream her throat raw, but only stands still, taking drags from a cigar with Meagan, passing it back and forth and wishing it was pipe tobacco instead.

Karnaca, in the distance, is alight. Those with dead at the Duke’s palace will be receiving the news throughout the night and into the early morning. The nobles will be making plans—and guessing Emily’s. Stilton is holding the city together as best he can with the help of Byrne’s Overseers, but their plan was intended for four people. They will need to leave for Dunwall as soon as possible, even with Karnaca in disarray. Delilah will know she’s coming, but as long as she doesn’t know the exact day, they’ll have some sort of advantage.

Meagan, mercifully, hasn’t made small talk, just offers her the cigar when she’s had her drag. She’s looking over the ocean, leaning against the railing, while Emily sits on it, her heels kicked into the scuppers for counterbalance. Meagan’s expression is—she keeps looking at Emily, then back at the ocean. Not out, but down, into the depths. She’s not the one for deep, philosophical advice or _feelings_ , and Emily is far too wrapped up in her own self to try and figure out what’s eating at Meagan, what secret is clawing at her ribcage and making it look like she’s got indigestion.

Eventually, the cigar is just a stub of a thing that burns her fingers when she smokes it, and she nearly tosses it into the ocean. Guilt stops her, and she stubs it out on the rail instead, and tosses in into one of the buckets on deck, the ones that get filled with the shell fragments that the gulls leave behind when they use the deck of the Wale to crack open mollusks and crabs.

She rubs at the back of her left hand, wryly amused despite herself, a huff of air that sounds almost like a laugh. Meagan echoes it with something like one of her own, her lips twisting into a half smile.

“Tank’s full,” she offers. “We can set out once Alexandria and Anton decide he’s stable enough to send to Addermire.”

Emily stops, looking over at her. “I—” she starts. “I thought he would—” _come_ _with us_. Not immediately, but after. Had planned for it without planning for it, somehow. Hypatia, of course, would never leave Addermire. Sokolov was a given, and it was Meagan’s damned ship. Stilton had said his goodbyes and promised to try and rally the city behind her—until she could find a replacement Duke or Duchess. Yet, in her shady reimaginings of taking Dunwall back and starting to purge it of the harm Delilah had done, Jindosh had been in the back of her mind, there. Assisting in the rebuilding, certainly. Squaring up with her father. Offending whatever aristocrats were left after Delilah’s purges, but _t_ _here_. But now...

There were some things you didn't recover from.

“He said the Duke didn’t know. How?” she grits out, instead, frustrated.

“He was sloppy,” Meagan says, almost detached. “Or the Duke suspected. Did he strike you as the sort of man who would have waited for evidence? Jindosh’s usefulness was outweighed by one too many snide comments. Abele was impulsive. One of a hundred tells. Who knows.”

It’s not sympathy, but Emily wouldn’t take sympathy from her right now. It’s what she needs, and she takes a shaky inhale.

“Besides,” Meagan says. “He’s not dead. And if anyone can fix—whatever the Duke did, it’s those two."

“No,” Emily agrees. “He’s not.”

The silence this time is far more companionable. They don’t light another cigar, and Emily resolves to curl up on a pile of canvas soon and sleep should no one come up from below deck to give them news.  Meagan should too—they’ll start the journey back to Dunwall once this is settled, and Meagan needs her wits to captain. Still, Emily doesn’t call attention to it, and Meagan makes no move to go.

They’ve been on deck maybe three hours in total when Hypatia ascends. Both women turn to her—Emily stopping her pacing and Meagan on the rail—and wait.

“He’s stable,” Hypatia starts. “There’s no internal bleeding, and the rest of his wounds are superficial, barring the broken arm. I’ve treated the shock. He’s asleep.”

Emily breaks her stillness and hurries over, prepared to interrogate (Hypatia braces, but it’s nothing she’s not dealt with before) but Meagan stops her, an arm held out, stopping her.

“But?” Meagan prompts, ever the realist.

“But he’s been… addled.” It’s clear Hypatia doesn’t like the word.

“‘Addled’?” Emily asks, pressing. Hypatia folds her arms over her chest, and gestures with her fingertips.

“Yes. He’s… confused. Concussed, really, but it’s deeper than that. From what you described about the machine he designed for the Duke, it was intended to pacify through destruction of certain types of… thought, I suppose. Levels of consciousness. Kirin’s of no help, and without the blueprints or further explanation…”

She spreads her hands, a sort of frustrated resignation. “There’s little Anton and I can do.”

 “I’ll get the blueprints,” Emily offers, already knowing the response. “I know the mansion, I’ve been in it before—the Sentinels know I’m not a threat—”

“No,” Meagan says, while Hypatia shakes her head.

“You have to go back to Dunwall,” Hypatia insists. Emily knows it’s true, that Delilah is far more important than one man, and that one day might mean another ship gets to Dunwall with news before the Wale. She knows what she must do. She is an Empress before she’s anything else—if she does not want the throne, she should have faded away once escaping the coup. Instead, she has fought.

It was only the protest of someone who knew the inevitable.

“You have to get the skiff ready to go, and gather your things before you can leave with him for Addermire,” Emily says, reorienting. “Can I see him?”

Hypatia closes her eyes, exhales. She’s his doctor—she knew him, when they were younger, little planets revolving around Sokolov’s sun—and her word is law.

“For a few minutes,” Hypatia allows. “If he shows signs of distress, you must leave. It could be made worse by—further irritation. I have very little idea of what I am dealing with, and will not, not until I have access to Addermire’s facilities.”

It’s generous.

“Alright,” Emily says. “Now?”

“Yes,” Hypatia says, “Follow me.”

There’s a cot in the main area of the ship, by the blackboard where the clues of the case had been tacked up. It’s been turned to the other side, placid and green and blank. Jindosh is asleep on the cot, dressed in what look like Sokolov’s clothes—a shirt that’s too big for him, hiked to the elbow to allow for a cast on his arm, and pants that are too short, all worn cotton and linen. A bandage around his head covers the burns, and his hair is shock-wild around the edges, no longer neatly combed. Sokolov is slouched in a chair, watching Jindosh sleep, but looks up at the sound of two sets of feet on the metal stairs.

Docile, he only blinks owlishly, even as Emily walks over and stares down at him. Once she’s close enough to touch, he does seem confused, pressing into the canvas of the cot and towards the wall. Her silence is weighty—she doesn’t know what to say.

“Fuck,” Meagan says, from the stairwell.

It’s not an inaccurate assessment. She has very little softness left in her after this past night, and she wants to—to shake him. Not to hurt him, only to snap him out of it, revive him like the society matrons are revived with smelling salts. He looks so frail, hollow despite the relatively healthy look of him, despite the burns. The blood has been washed away but is no light in _him_. If he opened his eyes, there would be no brightness in them.

“He needs to be at Addermire,” she says, knowing what Hypatia was trying to prevent her from understanding, and knowing why.

“I’ll get the skiff,” Meagan says, and leaves the room.

Here are the things an Empress does: prioritizes. Weighs impulse against the lives of all her subjects and chooses what does the greatest good.

The only way she has of helping Jindosh—of helping any of her citizens, anyone who has even been hungry, or ill, or afraid—is by breaking her aunt’s hold over the Isles, and finally making use of her birthright.

“Watch for the ship from Dunwall,” she says, and turns to walk back to her room so she doesn’t need to see Sokolov and Hypatia prepare him for transport.  She doesn't need that memory when she looks back on this night, when she remembers him. "Once the city is secure, I'll send one."


	8. Epilogue: Addermire Institute, Karnaca 1853

The man likes the sight of the waves crashing along the beach. The curl of the wave, how it repeated every time as the water falls in on itself with only slight variation. He likes consistency, in trusting that what he eats this morning is the same as what he ate the morning before, that the sun will rise always at ten past six and his alarm will go off half an hour later, like clockwork.

The particulars escape him beyond that. He grasps what season it is, but often not the month, and never the day. His nurse is patient, and will tell him if he asks, but he loathes that he does not know himself. That he cannot remember. He has just enough to know that something is missing, and it gnaws at him in the same way he saw the bloodfly larvae chew through the dead fish corpses earlier this morning.

He hates that he could be lied to so easily.

They have given him a chair to sit on and watch the waves, but he stands beside it. He is no longer so unsteady on his feet that he requires the use of a cane, but he is cautious on the sand, not least of all because he does not want it in his socks and shoes. If the dizziness returns, he may reach for and grip the back of the chair. A thought sits in the back of his mind, and he wants to knock it free, to know the whole shape of it, but like a ghost, it sits there, and he is unable to tease it out, and can only stare at the ocean.

He hears the nurse who minds him exclaim, somewhere over his shoulder, back where the grass meets the sand, and a gruff voice soothe her. No, he corrects himself, suddenly granted a moment of clarity, a brief sparking of connection, _the_ gruff voice, the one from the loudspeakers, the one that makes announcements. ‘ _I am Duke Attano_ ,’ yes, he recalls that, repetition having seared it into his brain when other things fall through his mind like water through a sieve. But it is the voice after that that makes him turn, the softer one—not in volume, but in tone, higher pitched but still with an air of absolute confidence about it.

He turns because he is compelled to look at her.

She stands, next to the man, speaking with the nurse, gaze flinty and serious. She is not beautiful in the way of classical elegance. There is a sharpness to her features that prevents her from being maidenly. She gestures with her hands; they move like birds. She commands, she demands recognition. It is like breathing to her, he knows, and the sharp pain that accompanies, as his nurse puts it, ‘over-extending’ himself, nails into his temples.

But he does not look away.

He is rewarded for it when at a pause in the conversation, she looks at him. Their eyes meet. She measures him, and he hopes the sum she comes to is satisfactory, because the pain in his temples has reached a crisis point and his hands are starting to shake. The burns that spiderweb over his back and up along his neck spark with pinpricks of pain. He looks away because of that, and then—back to the ocean. If he does not look at them, the pain will go away. He will forget.

Her boots (he knows it to be her) crunch through the sand but stop behind him. He ignores her in favor of the ocean. The pain has subsided, but not entirely, and his hand still twitch, like beetles with their legs cut off, jerking. She’s rude. The thought comes to him suddenly. She’s being impetuous and rude, because she knows—

Knows what?

“Kirin,” she says. He hisses in an inhale. She knows his name. He doesn’t understand why she wouldn’t, but she’s so casual about it. He has—nothing, and she has something he forgets. Will forget. He knows the shape of his name _now_ , but soon it will blow away, until someone else says it.

“I spoke with Alexandria,” the woman starts.

“Who?” he says, because he supposes she will need the situation’s depth and breadth measured for her if the nurse failed. This mistake, this _misattribution_ of competence and wholeness of his body and mind is made frequently. He would not remember to be annoyed by it if it wasn’t.

“ _Alexandria_ ,” she stresses. “Dr. Hypatia.”

His face is steeled into blankness, although something flickers in the back of his mind. Does he know the name? Can he connect it to a face? Perhaps.

“Your doctor,” she says, and folds her arms. “She runs Addermire. This place.”

He does focus in on the great building at her back, all great stone and copper tinted with green patina. Yes—there is a sign. Addermire Institute for Infectious Disease. He picks it out through the sun is in his eyes.

“Yes,” the man agrees. That is where they are.

“I didn’t think you would be this—” she gestures sharply, her hand cutting through the air. She is angry, and he only is inclined to narrow his eyes, filled with a sudden impatience and displeasure. He turns his back to her—the ocean, again.

The curl of the wave, the water falling in on itself; infinite, perfect repetition. It soothes him—and he remembers, once more, nothing beyond it. Idly, he notices his own hunger. Perhaps they will have tarts with lunch today.

There is a crunch in the sand behind him, and he realizes there’s a woman at his shoulder. “Hello,” he says, pleasantly, minding his manners. Her clothes are very fine, and she is not beautiful, not classically, but there is a fineness to her features, an elegance, though it is pinched. She does not like him—or it is disappointment. He thinks he has seen it before. “Who are you?”

He does not remember much—he has a watch, which tells him the time, and there is a nurse, always, to help keep him safe, and she will tell him what he needs to know, when he forgets.

“Emily,” she says, some of the disappointment falling away as that face smooths into placidity.

“Did I know you?” he asks, which he has asked before. He can anticipate the answer.

“Yes,” she admits, and something flinches behind her eyes. “You did.”

“Were we friends?” the man asks.

“No,” Emily admits, slowly.

He is wary, suddenly, and steps back. He can recall others coming here, asking things of him, asking for things he could not give. Not in a while, though—nurse had put a stop to it. This does not have the same feeling to him, but he is still uncomfortable.

“We were… allies,” Emily says, solidifying her word choice after she’s said it, a small nod as she secures herself in it. “You helped me, and we had an agreement. You fulfilled your half,” she says, catching the wry concern in his furrowing brow, “and I need to give you mine.”

She exhales.

“As much as is still applicable.”

She looks at the beach’s sand rather than him. There are questions he could ask her, but the answers would fall away nearly as soon as he learned them.

“Well,” he says, and reaches out his hand, anticipating behind handed something—not the one with the missing fingers, which he normally keeps to his side.

“… of course,” she says, looking back up and behind her to the man who has been chatting with the guards up on the dock, drifting away from his nurse. He steps down, onto the beach, and as he walks he pulls out a leather tube with brass hardware, which he hands to Emily. She pulls the top off and unfurls a scroll. His nurse comes back to join them, and Emily puts the tube into her care.

“Your degree,” she says, and hands it to him. A shadow falls over her face, and the vulnerability of it strips some of the majesty from her. He wants to shame her for it. “I cannot—the other things I promised you, I can’t give them to you. I’m sorry. But you’ll always be safe and taken care of, and if you need anything—anything—you must write me, or Duke Attano. Whatever it is, you’ll have it.”

She’s fierce by the end, eyes intent.

He doesn’t know what to say. The words swim on the paper—

_—we, the undersigned, hereby recognize Kirin Jindosh, in this year, 1853—_

“What do you say, Kirin,” his nurse reprimands, and the annoyance that pinches his face is foreign in its fierceness, stirring him through his docility. He cannot remember ever feeling cross with her, but this is so sudden and absolute that an acidic barb comes to mind and he is about to spit it out—

“He owes me nothing,” Emily cuts through, firm, and her fingers are on top of his hand, the briefest of steadying touches. Her hand is warm, and it is so different than the clinical touch of his nurse when she tends him that it shocks him in its intimacy. He looks from her hand to her face, and then she is removing her hand, and turning to walk away. Dumbstruck, he watches her leave. Emily goes towards the station, and the man falls into place at her side. His fingers start to curl into the certificate, risking wrinkling it, and his nurse steps in.

“Isn’t this nice, Kirin,” his nurse says, gently removing the paper from his fingertips, looking it over. “From the Academy, all the way in Gristol—we’ll have it framed, won’t we, just like Dr. Hypatia’s, and put it on your wall.”

Emily Emily Emily. It sticks in his brain, even as she and the man with her step into the carriage and it rolls down the track and out of his sight. He can’t forget her. He won’t allow it.

“I want—” he says and interrupts his nurse to say it. “—I want to write her. I will need paper. Ink.”

His fingers curl into fists and he realizes that his head is pounding, but he holds tight to the thought despite the pain. “Do not let me forget,” he tells her—Emily, not his nurse, more pleading then he intended to be, and the weakness in his own voice irritates him.

His nurse finishes rolling the paper, and tucks it back into the tube it came in. “Of course, Kirin. Now let’s get inside—it’s almost time for supper.”

She lays her hand on his side, guides him, but he refuses to turn his head away from the horizon until the last possible moment.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My original intention of this fic was a one-shot for the kink meme that made use of That Scene and expanded upon Jindosh a little. The main themes of Dishonored are how the choices you make affect others, and the legacies you leave behind. I first played the Clockwork Mansion level at a prerelease event and didn’t get to the end—our time on the demo machines was limited, and the clue I needed to progress in the scavenger hunt was pretty easy to grab. 
> 
> (It was Jindosh’s name, which you were supposed to tell the bartender and you’d get a Jindosh cocktail which had the next clue on the bottom of the cup.)
> 
> I never finished the level and assumed that we’d be grabbing this asshole and he’d fulfill a Sokolov role. Then the game came out and he didn’t. I think this has been a complaint with a lot of people. He’s a compelling character, like all of the Dishonored characters, but he’s one we only get a tiny snapshot of, like Lucia Pastor and Thomas and so many others. I hope that this story fleshed him out a little more and proved an interesting read. I have an Emily/Outsider story in the works and intend to start posting that soonish, so keep an eye out.
> 
> Many thanks to the original prompter on the kink meme. I hope you’re still around, buddy, and if you have some sort of deleted scene you’d like me to throw up in addition to this, please let me know.
> 
> It’s been a wild ride and a little more than a year and half writing this. Thank you for all your comments, kudos, and views, even when I took six months to write a chapter. Every email telling me someone read and liked my story made me smile and I hope it continues to please new readers like it pleased you guys.
> 
> You can find me on tumblr @ sincethewreck.


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